Dominic,
Thanks for the reference from Wikipedia. I see that yyyy-mm is a standard format. However, I’m guessing (perhaps incorrectly) that Excel is a very common spreadsheet program worldwide and I haven’t found an
easy way to convert the format yyyy-mm into a date in Excel. I’m not trying to be oppositional, I just would like to use dates that are recognizable in date format in Excel since this is the program we use to load title lists into our knowledgebase.
I realize that this may not be a problem for larger ERMS companies, but I thought I’d at least mention this issue since it does affect my daily workflow. Gold Rush has a fairly small customer base so if this
isn’t an issue for larger ERMS providers, we will just convert the dates to a format that works better for us. I have a feeling that this probably isn’t an issue for the larger providers, but since the KBART list is an open list, I wanted to at least raise
the issue.
Thanks,
Rose
From: Dominic Benson [mailto:Dominic.Benson@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2012 11:20 AM
To: Rose Nelson; kbart_interest@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Date format on KBART compliant lists
Hello Rose,
Your own formats are not quite standard. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 and
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1912894/c-sharp-convert-datetime-to-iso-format-yyyy-mm-dd-hhmmss
Warmest regards,
Dom Benson
--
Electronic Resources Librarian, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK
Hello,
I’m not quite sure who to address this question to so I thought I’d send it to the general KBART list. The CO Alliance of Research Libraries developed an ERMS, Gold Rush back in 2001 and now we license this software to libraries outside
of our consortium. I was very excited to discover so many new title lists in standard format available from the KBART website. This is a great improvement. However, I noticed that several publishers still use non-standard date formats (unrecognizable by
Excel) for coverage dates. Before we load these title lists into Gold Rush, we have to manually correct coverage dates. The non-standard format which I am referring to is yyyy-mm e.g. 2010-12. It would be MUCH better if publishers were willing to put dates
in one of the multitude of standard Excel formats such as yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy, mm-dd-yyyy. Even the alpha numeric dates that Gale Cengage works can be converted to a numerical date by our loader.
What is the likelihood of developing a more structured date standard for KBART lists? It seems to me that it would be easier for the publishers and ERMS providers to use standard dates. I’m not sure why so many have adopted the non-standard
format. I was really hoping that with KBART dates would be standardized across the board.
Any updates or discussion on this topic is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Rose Nelson
Systems Librarian/Gold Rush Project Manager
CO Alliance of Research Libraries
3801 E. Florida Ave. Ste 515
Denver, CO 80210
303-759-3399 X103
Fax 303-759-3363
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