Dublin Core: Date

As I'm going about trying to order the DC elements I would like to work with, it is interesting to see some of the complexity, and problems, with elements that would appear to be fairly straight-forward and simple. Take the Date element for instance...not a real difficult item to wrap your head around, right? Just put the copyright date or something? Well, no, it's not quite THAT simple. Dublin Core actually allows several qualifiers to be used in conjunction with Date, such as: Created, Valid, Available, Issued, and Modified, in order to modify the type of temporal information that can be entered in a metadata record. Thus, you can use DateIssued for something like the publication year for a work, or DateCreated for when an electronic document was first generated if needing more specificity than the general Date element can provide.

Another consideration for the entry of date information includes the exact format or sequence with which it is entered into a record. For example, today's date can be described:

February 23, 2014

February 23, '14

Feb 23, 2014

23 February, 2014

2/23/14

2/23/2014

23/2/14

23/2/2014

2-23-14

2.23.14

And that just scratches the surface of variations possible, not to mention factoring in foreign languages. So which format does a metadata creator use to ensure that the date is adequately understood by potential users? Accounting for regional differences in date presentation, and the fact that computers can't even interpret some of the variations, there is no perfect solution. The W3CDTF encoding scheme is one possible solution, and prescribes the use of the YYYY-MM-DD format for single dates. Whichever method is settled upon by the metadata creator, however, the importance of consistency in date entry can not be overstated.