Encoded Archival Description Tag Library, Version 2002

EAD Elements

<date> Date

Description:

A generic element that contains a month, day, or year in any format. Use <date> to identify any dates that merit encoding, except for the creation and other relevant dates of the described materials, which are instead tagged with the <unitdate> element. Examples of dates that might merit encoding are a person's birth date, the date the materials were acquired, or the date of an event in a chronology. These dates may be entered in the form of text or numbers, and may consist of a single date or range of dates.

A standard numeric form of the date (YYYYMMDD, etc.) can be specified with the NORMAL attribute to facilitate machine comparison of dates for searching, for example, 19480101/19980401 (YYYYMMDD/YYYYMMDD), or 1948/1998 (YYYY/YYYY). The TYPE attribute can be used to supply a more specific designation, for example, "life," "flourish," "depiction," "publication," or "acquisition." The CERTAINTY attribute may be used to indicate the degree of precision in the dating, for example, "circa," "approximately," or "after." The CALENDAR attribute, which has a default value of "gregorian," specifies the calendar from which the date stems. The value "ce" (common or Christian era) is the default for the ERA attribute.

May contain:

#PCDATA, emph, extptr, lb, ptr

May occur within:

change, chronitem, creation, entry, event, extref, extrefloc, imprint, item, label, legalstatus, p, physdesc, physfacet, publicationstmt, ref, refloc, subtitle, title, titlepage, titleproper, unittitle

Attributes:

Examples:

1.

    <bibref>
        <persname role="author">Kinder, Dolores.</persname>
        <title render="italic>Once Upon a Lullaby.</title>
            <imprint><geogname>New York: </geogname>
                <publisher>Wells &amp; Sons, </publisher>
            <date type="publication">1931</date>
        </imprint>
    </bibref>

2.

    <acqinfo>
        <p>This collection, number
        <num type="donor">1988-015,</num> was donated by Mrs. Dolores Franklin
        on <date type="acquisition" normal="19880423">April 23, 1988.</date>
        </p>
    </acqinfo>