At 03:24 PM 12/13/00 -0600, Eileen Quam wrote:
>
>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).
I'll tell you have we handled that in the California Digital Library
databases, although I can hardly claim that it is "standard."
Our need was to sort journal article records by date. We use a date format
of YYYYMMDD but only in the sort key, so this didn't affect display of the
date from the original metadata record. We decided to make Spring =
YYYY0332 so that it would sort at the end of the month but would not sort
interleaved with any items with a legitimate date of March 31. Other
seasons are treated analogously. We didn't deal with date ranges, using
only the first date. Although this solution is a bit klugey, we actually
could work backwards from the date to the season as long as we keep our
season-to-date mappings unique.
----------------------------------------------
Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
University of California Digital Library
http://www.kcoyle.net 510/987-0567
----------------------------------------------
|