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
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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
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