I have 2 sets of street data. One set is divided into small sections (essentially there is a small line every block), this data set is for asset management, IE things like manholes and sewer lines are also given a street id which is the the unique value for each line segment. The other data set is more so for operational value, It is just continuous by street name so instead of the streets being split at every block to identify its street id it is one big line for every street/avenue. What i am trying to do is add the individual street id's from the split data set to the continuous line data set without splitting any lines or having duplicate features. thanks for the help!
An attribute join (relate), (many to one) will preserve attributes but why not just keep both incarnations? Disk space is cheap and both offer their own capabilities with respect to geoprocessing functions and functionality. As for mapping, you can simply turn off the version you don't want. If it is an organizational thing, you can create a group within the dataframes table of contents and put both in there