Dates
I've been indexing many dates where 11/7/98 would mean the 11th day of July, 1998.
However, some indexing dates with 11/7/98 mean November 7, 1998. When there's a date with one number over 12, you can tell that's the date and not the month. But when both dates are under 12, is there a protocol?
Best Answer
-
MDY date format is realistically almost always a US thing, so I'd say that if the collection is from the US you should assume MDY, otherwise DMY. Others may say that's too simplistic though!
1
Answers
-
Thanks. I'll do that unless notified otherwise.
0 -
I would suggest that the best course to take is to get familiar with the entire batch. You can be pretty confident that there will be internal consistency. If the obvious dates in the batch such as 1/28/98 are all MDY then you can be confident that the ambiguous ones such as 5/4/98 are also MDY while if you see a bunch of 28/1/98s, you can be sure that 5/4/98 is April 5.
General rules and assumptions are not always helpful because there will be exceptions such as indexes in the Norwegian archives database. Norway uses the general European style of DMY but the index always has: birth date - MD, birth year - Y because they are actually using the ISO dating style of YMD even when they put the year on a different line.
4 -
@MandyShaw1 The best thing to do is look at the Project Instructions and examples. If you are indexing US, California, San Francisco—Halstead Gray Mortuary Records, 1895–2006 [Part B] , the PI examples clearly show the dates as month/day/year —- this is the only project I've seen in a few years to use month/day/year. Other projects like NATs or Irish use Day/month/year
1