However, the approach to the timespan was to illustrate the three decade effort to develop a code for the description and cataloging of art collections without success. Do not make your datum more accurate than it is. Information should be reduced to its smallest unit. No controlled vocabulary should be produced in the absence of actual usage. The amount of effort to record a particular piece of information must be weighed against the amount of usefulness returned from that piece of information.
Utility always takes precedence over philosophy.
Not all information useful to a scholar is worth recording. It is easier to catalog whole groups of entities than to remember which ones are the right ones. Everything, and especially free text, should be fully and Boolean searchable. You should always buy a program more powerful than you anticipate you will need, since inevitably you will not have anticipated everything you will need, for which compare Principle Three. 10. The official rule for relational databases that no piece of information should be repeated exists only to be broken.