Hi Keith

I take your point, but I reckon that with a bit of definition of canonical fields and formats one should be able to clean the lot up with the exception of cases where previous manual record entry had violated sensible rules. Most of the problems could be cleaned up automatically, and only the horrible examples (basically errors) need get special manual treatment. Trying to construct special rules for your data base to negotiate, would fall foul of the ingenuity of fools.

Whether you really need a "formal data base" or not is an open question. Some direct access to properly sorted and indexed files can be startlingly effective.