Discussions on Periodical Publication Date
Issue as machine readable text?
I know this will have pretty big consequences, but would it be possible to change Issue from Integer to Machine readable text? The reason I ask is because some publication volumes contain multiple issues (e.g., "1-2"). This seems silly to me but they do it. Also, there are probably some cases where Issue is a character (e.g., i, A). The Additional date info property could be used to store this information but it doesn't really seem appropriate to do so - it refers to date.
Another thing, would you mind moving the Additional date info to the bottom of the list of User Created Properties? It is probably less often used than the other properties and it typically refers to a subset of the Date property.
Changing the expected type of "issue number" is a good idea. I'll have to check out how much data needs to be migrated, and find out if changing the type will break any applications, but I think it should be pretty straight-forward.
I've moved the "additional date info" down; it won't display as well (e.g., "Summer 2007" will now display as "2007 Summer") but I think you're right that this is less annoying than having it appear first for data entry.
