Dates: FAQ

How do I enter dates?

Use one of these two options: YYYY or YYYY-YYYY . Examples:

2013
1850-1870

What if something is undated?

The local practice at Pacific is to use a date range that encompasses the earliest and latest possible dates of creation, using the format YYYY-YYYY. For example, if you think it might date from the 1950s-1980s, use: 1950-1989. Do not enter 'unknown', 'no date', 'approximately', '?', etc. (This is in order to facilitate searching functionality across the broadest possible spectrum of research platforms.) Don't spend hours researching the dates of an item!

Do I record the date when something was created, or when it was copied, when it was digitized, or....?

For images in our digital collections records (Omeka)
The default assumption is that we are recording when an image was ORIGINALLY CREATED. For example, let's say that you had scanned a copy print of a photograph. The scan was made in 2015. The copy print was made in 1960 based on a photograph that was originally made in 1890. For the purposes of our records, we would normally record the date in this case as: Date created = 1890. It is technically possible to add more date fields to note that the item also has a Date Digitized = 2015; and a Date Modified = 1960. However, in practice, we normally do not create these fields, because we want to make searching and display of results easier for our users to understand. You may however want to add a note in a description field about the dates if they are important for a user to be aware of.

For archives, art, museum and rare book records in ArchivesSpace:
Archives, Art & Museums = Normally, use the date when the physical object was created. For a handwritten copy of an earlier document, you would use the date of the copy. See DACS Section 2.4.

For rare books and other published items:
Use the date of publication. See RDA for more detail.

Why do we only enter the year and not the month/day/etc.?

The records that we create may be harvested into many different systems. For example, a record in ArchivesSpace could potentially get made into an EAD record that is harvested up to regional discovery databases, and from there, it could get re-harvested into national or international databases. The various platforms that the records end up on may or may not be able to handle searching by month/date, and inclusion of these in the date field could introduce errors, especially if they are not formatted in exactly the right manner. By only recording years, we greatly cut down on the potential for errors and for having to clean up thousands of records manually later on. If the exact month/day/etc. are important for the user to know, you can always write them into a Description field.

Why do you have to enter the date twice in ArchivesSpace?

The "Expression" field creates a human-readable date that will display to users in the public side of ArchivesSpace. The "Begin/End" date is a normalized version of the date (like fixed fields in a MARC record) that facilitates computerized searching by date. We fill out both so that both machines and humans can easily 'read' the date.

What if most of an archives collection is from a certain date range, but there are one or two "outliers"?

In ArchivesSpace, you can use the Date Type = Bulk Dates to signify that most of the collection comes from a certain date range, but that there are also a few outliers. In that case, you'd make an additional Date entry for Date = Inclusive Dates for the full date range of all the material. For example, if you were given a collection of pioneer documents from the 1860s-1880s, but the donor also included some of his own research that he wrote up in the 1990s, in the Resource Record you could record it thus:

Dates: 1860-1889 (Bulk); 1860-1999 (Inclusive)

For Accession Records and other types of records, however, including Bulk Dates is usually overkill. When there are just a few items outside the main date range, it is all right to ignore them for the purposes of this field in an accession record. For example, if you were given a collection of pioneer documents from the 1860s-1880s, but the donor also included some of his own research that he wrote up in the 1990s, using Date = 1860-1889 here would be fine.