OSU Library Metadata: A Guideline to Best Practices: Date Digital

Label: Date Digital
Maps to Dublin Core Element Name: dateDigital
Maps to MARC field (in World Cat): 264
Mandatory: Yes, if applicable
Repeatable: Yes. May also choose to use the date field with the following refinements in place of
Date.Digital if the refinements are more appropriate.
Qualifiers:
Refinements:

Schemes: ISO 8601 (W3C-DTF)

 A date of an event in the life cycle of the resource.

Typically, Date [Digital] will be associated with the creation or availability of the resource. Recommended best practice for encoding the date value is defined in a profile of ISO 8601 [W3CDTF] and follows the YYYY-MM-DD format.

Date of creation or availability of the digital resource. The contributing institution may approximate the date a resource was digitized.

1. A resource may have several dates associated with it, including: creation date, copyright date, revision date, edition date, modification date, etc.
2.  Enter dates in the form “YYYY-MM-DD” in accordance with the W3C Date Time Format (W3CDTF) encoding scheme. Use a single hyphen to separate the year, month, and date components:

a. Year YYYY (“1997” for the year 1997))
b. Year and month: YYYY-MM (“1997-07” for July 1997))
c. Complete date: YYYY-MM-DD (“1997-07-16” for July 16, 1997)

Notes:

1. Enter dates pertaining to the original version of the resource under the Date Original element.

2. Local systems or databases may utilize other date formats and conventions for date entry. Also,
some databases distinguish between free text "display" date values, and normalized date values for
more efficient back-end sorting.

3. The contributing institution may approximate the date a resource was digitized.