Block 3-- hosts all data about parts of the temple or of the site that have been reused by a christian church. The current schema provides only one element for this block, the field 300, called "reused part". This is the only field in the schema which is divided in subfields. Every fields can be divided in subsegments, called subfields, distinguished by a letter (preceded by a prime sign, that we are going to use here, or other conventional signs), chosen at will. In this case we have four subfields in this element: ^p, ^t, ^s and ^r, i.e. reused part, kind of reuse, century of reuse (usually the century when the church has been built), and a fourth subfield that was created to host the kind of reuse in case that some parts of the temple had been used in a different way, like the altar of Cybele in Sermoneta, reused as the bishop’s seat. In current edition of the database, though, this subfield hasn’t been used and we preferred to add these data in the subfield ^t. Why didn’t we make different fields like in block 2--? Because different parts of a temple or site can be reused, but in different ways and centuries: the ancient Pantheon in Rome was turned into the church of St Mary ad Martyrum in 7th century, but its bronze columns have been founded in 17th century to became the columns of St. Peter’s baldachin. If we had created different fields for reused part and for the century of reuse, we would have lost or made less readable the order of data, by having a list of part first and then a list of centuries, without being sure about how to match them. If we divide information about one part in one single field and repeat that field for every reused part, we’ll be able to see information in order.
This doesn’t imply that the discussion about the standard couldn’t lead to new fields for 3-- block.
The language of this block will be the language chosen as language of the database.
Since its birth, one of the most important problem about the survey was how should be called different parts of a temple, so to call them always in the same way. We have already spoken about the importance of calling things always in the same way, and we have just said that this information must be express in the language of the database. Then, we need to create a controlled vocabulary, a list of words on which we agree, in order to use only those. Various national groups taking part to the survey could eventually translate them in a help page and also write tables for reference from unused words to used ones (these tables must be the result of an agreement among participants while creating the controlled vocabulary).
In creating the controlled vocabulary, we should keep in mind that the survey is widening to sacred sites and doesn’t deal only with temples anymore (temples are monumental buildings, the word "sacred site" means something more general); as an example, we should think about changing the used word "foundations" in the more proper word "site", because the word foundations has a exact architectural meaning and many churches have been built on the place of a former temple, but not necessarily using its foundations.
These are not strictly needed, but useful to avoid drawing up too much tables: illustrations with names of the various part of a temple (like in vocabularies for children) as used in the survey, so that to make its comprehension more immediate.
In Italy, we usually indicate centuries with Roman numerals, while in English ordinal numbers are expressed with Arabic numerals followed by the end of the word. In order to search for information, Roman numerals cause more problems because most of softwares can’t recognize them as numbers and deal with them as they were part of text; this means that, if we look for the century VI (6th), we’ll find also the data related to the centuries VII, VIII, XVI, XVII and XVIII because they contain the same string of characters. In the current edition of the survey we expressed centuries with words (second, third…) but this will complicate any attempt to widen the survey to other countries because it would imply the use of other translation tables, in order to allow people who don’t know enough the language of the database to search in it anyway. Maybe the use of cardinal numbers is a better solution, with appropriate expedient of punctuation to avoid searching problems as in searching for Roman numerals.
In the current edition, the field 300 is divided into four subfields, one of which, as explained before, isn’t currently used. While discussing about the new standard, it’s necessary to decide how to deal with this subfield, whether to use it or delete it, and if a review of this field’s division is needed. The letters that indicate subfields have been chosen because they were significant of Italian words, but probably a change will be needed if we choose for the database a language different from Italian. Like three-digit tags that distinguish fields, also the letters distinguishing subfields must be the same in every database taking part to the project, so that data exchange could easily be done.
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