Tom Jenkins writes:
> Just wondering if anyone knew if there was an accepted standard way of
> storing BC dates in collection databases so they're searchable online.
> Putting negative dates seems the most obvious to me, but perhaps this is
> frowned upon... I know the British Museum have BC objects online; anyone
> there or anywhere else care to share their thoughts?
Hi Tom,
It depends on how the collection database makes it out to the
on-line site: to do effective date searching, the web site search
mechanics you're using will need to understand the dates attached
to your objects. So you'll need a search engine which understands
BC dates, and then you'll also need to load the BC dates in quite
explicitly. "Negative dates" sounds appealing, but there's no
certainty anywhere that this will be effective: indeed you'd hope
any collection database would refuse to accept "-15/03/0057"
becuase it's just odd and at best ambiguous, whereas "57 BC" is
clear.
The British Museum catalogue their collection using MUSIMS (now
called MuseumIndex+). MuseumIndex+ has specific support for BC
dates, as well as other things such as circa dates, ranges,
periods ("pre-neolithic", "renaissance", etc), and so on. I can
let you into a little trade secret here: MuseumIndex+ stores BC
dates *internally* as negative numbers. But at all interfaces -
user interfaces and machine interfaces (APIs + protocols) - they
are proper BC dates.
Best regards,
Michael.
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