If you are coding a number for seasons, the Winter = December or
January is a much bigger problem than Spring = March or April or
May. In searching and filing, a resource could be moved quite far
from its proper place by putting in an arbitrary month number for
Winter and using the year on the resource. (The same problem
applies to Summer in the Southern Hmisphere if a resource uses
that dating)
Dan Robinson
HW Wilson Company
Bronx, NY
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On 15 Dec 00, at 9:41, Ann Apps wrote:
> Eileen,
>
> > I am having a problem with the ISO 8601 Date standard (i.e.
> > 2000-12-13). There appears to be no way to express dates such as
> > "August 2000" or "Spring-Summer 1999", which regularly appear on the
> > items in question (I am building a citaiton database). Do you know if
> > the DC community has bumped into this issue and come up with a
> > preferred workaround (i.e. include the "human readable" format as a
> > note...). I could translate to ISO8601 for the sake of
> > storage/ordering, but want the natural language dates for display.
> >
> >From work I've done I know that this is a problem. Publishers
> expect 'cover date' to be displayed as on the journal issue cover,
> and researchers may search for the date in this way. If the date
> has been translated into a standard numerical format such as 2000-
> 12-15 the knowledge of the original way the date was displayed is
> lost. Seasons are a particular problem: is Spring March or April?;
> does Winter mean December or January, ie. is this the beginning
> or the end of the year?
>
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