Hello Rose,
Simon Fraser University, in BC, Canada also has its own open source ERM and knowledge base and we utilize many KBART lists wherever they are available from publishers and providers.
yyyy-mm-dd is the ISO date standard that our systems have always used, even before the KBART recommended practice came out.
See section 5.3.2 of the Recommended Practice.
http://www.uksg.org/kbart/s5/guidelines/data_fields#first_issue_date
ISO 8601
http://www.iso.org/iso/date_and_time_format
MS Excel defaults to American/US date formats, but you can change your Excel settings by going to the Number settings - choosing Date and then changing the locale (location) to something that recognizes the ISO date standard such as, English (Canada) or English (UK), and then you can choose that format.
Before KBART was widely adopted, we were doing the opposite - converting all those non-ISO dates to the ISO standard.
Sandra.
From: "Rose Nelson" <Rose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "kbart interest" <kbart_interest@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, June 1, 2012 9:48:07 AM
Subject: [kbart_interest] Date format on KBART compliant lists
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
--
_________________________________________________________________________________
Sandra Wong, Electronic Resources Librarian
Simon Fraser University Library
8888 University Drive
Burnaby, BC Canada V5A 1S6
Email: swongj@xxxxxx or lib-ejadmin@xxxxxx
Phone: 778.782.4930
Fax: 778.782.3023
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