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. > If you look at the recommendation made by the dc-citation working group about how to capture the bibliographic citation of a journal article in DC, you'll see that we include a 'Chronology' sub-element in the citation string. Chronology could contain the date in its written form. 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? For real applications, I have included a second Date element for which I've defined a local qualifier. The string literal content of this 'local' date element is the date in 'words' as it originally appeared. Thus I have the date encoded in a standard way for machine processing, and also the date in a display format. Best wishes, Ann -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mrs. Ann Apps. Electronic Publishing @ MIMAS. Manchester Computing, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 0161 275 6040 Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------