<date>: best practice

[SJagodzinski]

Find and describe best practice for uncertain dates in <date>, <toDate>, <fromDate>.

Creator of issue

1. Silke Jagodzinski
2. TS-EAS: EAC-CPF subgroup
3. [email protected] or [email protected]

The issue relates to

• EAC-CPF schema issue
• EAC-CPF Tag Library issue
• EAD schema issue
• EAD Tag Library issue
• Schema issue
• Tag Library issue
• Suggestions for all schemas
• Suggestions for all Tag Libraries
• Other

Wanted change/feature

I have been asked for a solution to put a textual date in a EAC-CPF record like: “ca. 1868” or: “beginning 19th century”. I assumed that EAC-CPF would have something like EAD for that: @certainty, but to my surprise this is not supported.
Do you know how to deal with this (other than adding a descriptive note to a datarange)?

[@cannedit ]

[karinbredenberg]

Reconciliation with EAD needed.

[ailie-s]

Outcomes of discussion in Austin, August 2019:

1. Add optional @certainty attribute (from EAD3) to <date>, <fromDate> and <toDate>
   Example:

<dateRange>
    <fromDate standardDate="1762" certainty="circa">c.1762</fromDate>
    <toDate standardDate="1814" certainty="circa">c.1814</toDate>
</dateRange>

2. Allow for the optional use of EDTF (https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/edtf.html) integrated in ISO 8601-2019, to qualify a date as uncertain (?), approximate (~) and uncertain and approximate (%).
   Example:

<dateRange>
    <fromDate standardDate="1762?">c.1762</fromDate>
    <toDate standardDate="1814?">c.1814</toDate>
</dateRange>