On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 07:45:13AM -0700, David Bigwood wrote: > It sounds like you want to use something like the Extended Date Time > Format, https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/ It can handle uncertain > dates, date ranges, when only the decade is known and more. However, I > don't think any of the date fields in DSpace are set-up to handle it > correctly. If I'm wrong I hope someone lets me and everyone know. Maybe you > could use a field not as a means to sort or filter by date but more as a > text for display information purposes? Part of the summary field perhaps?
Executive summary: as always with time, this is a large, complex and tangled problem. DSpace doesn't fully address it. There are two related issues with imprecise dates: o how do we store them? o how do we compare them? DSpace stores all metadata in character form. Things like dates are interpreted when used. DSpace is able to parse incomplete dates such as "1957" in some fields, but IIRC it treats them as instants, not imprecise dates or ranges. Answering the question, "is 'circa 1850' within the interval '1851' to '14-Feb-1907'," is an *interesting programming problem*. We have an interest in imprecise dates here, so I began to explore storing them as DCMI Period (https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-period/), a couple of years ago, but I don't have anything resembling working code to, for example, *search* in such fields. (To do that efficiently would require writing a new datatype for Solr, among other things.) EDTF looks interesting, since it distinguishes between imprecision and uncertainty. Thanks for the link. -- Mark H. Wood Lead Technology Analyst University Library Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis 755 W. Michigan Street Indianapolis, IN 46202 317-274-0749 www.ulib.iupui.edu -- All messages to this mailing list should adhere to the DuraSpace Code of Conduct: https://duraspace.org/about/policies/code-of-conduct/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DSpace Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-community/20200701132826.GA18037%40IUPUI.Edu.
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