At 3:30 AM -0500 7/30/97, Jordan Reiter wrote:
>At 8:24 PM -0500 07-29-1997, John Dasher wrote:
>>As Rebecca pointed out, the MARC format does have the capability for
>>indicating dates with era notation. MARC happens to use "c" for B.C., "d"
>>for A.D., so 221 B.C. is c0221 and 960 A.D. is d0960. A description can be
>>found at: http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdnumb.html#mrcb045
>>
>>Additionally, the Z39.50 Implementors Group have proposed their own method
>>which may be viewed at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/copen/date.html.
>>
>>In summary, if we augment ISO 8601 by supporting unlimited digits for the
>>year along with MARC's era notation, I think we have a solution that should
>>work for everyone. Thoughts?
>I personally prefer the Z39.50 implementation, for a number of reasons.
>First of all, it's much more intuitive to write out -5000 when you're
>thinking of an even 5000 BC. The MARC's use of "c" for BC and "d" AD seems
>to me a little strange, considering that it ignores the more date-minded
>aspects of the two initialisms. Since the C stands for "Christ" and the D
>stands for Domini (sp?), which means something along the lines of "of our
>Lord", it makes me wonder whether bible-thumpers were at all involved in
>the development of the standard. ;-) Considering that some people who
>aren't as enthusiastic about the savior choose to use BCE and CE to
>indicate periods before and after (respectively) 1 AD instead of the
>Christian-based standard. Why not abandon human silliness once and for all
>and look at time as it really is--numbers. As such, the Z39.50
>implementation has my vote.
>From an engineering perspective, we don't care whether it's "c" and "d" or
the minus "-" sign. However, if the minus sign is to be used, then ISO 8601
needs to change the character it uses for a delimiter, perhaps to a "/"?
Regards,
John Dasher
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