Moving date fields to DateRangeField

[alexduryee]

Dates are currently assigned to _ssm fields, which store them as plain strings. This results in gaps in search, where e.g. 2012 does not match a record with a date range of 2005-2015 - in fact, they fail the AND query and will not return matches (e.g. jabara 1959 returns 0 results on the demo site).

Would it be possible/reasonable to take advantage of Solr's DateTimeField, which would allow for more sophisticated date handling?