Year of Publication as not only 4 digits format

Hi, first of all, thank you for this great module. Our university department is trying to use biblio for our new project - database of urban history manuscripts. So far there are two issues in which we really appreciate any help. 1) There is usually no single year of manuscripts origin, sometimes its range of years or something like "first half of fifteen century". I'm able to change value in MySQL table from INT to VarChar, but it do not solve the issue. 2) Basically the same problem in author / contributor field - its not always the single name, but it is institution too - like "Municipal Office" of "Cloister of ..." - we need to overwrite biblio logical sorting to make output exactly the same as table input in array name.
Thank you in advance.