date

• Obligation:  See Application Profiles
• Occurrence:  See Application Profiles
• Conditions:  See Application Profiles
• Scheme:  Varies. See Application Profiles; see also DCMI Period, W3C-DTF

Element Semantics (Definition)

A date associated with an event in the life cycle of the resource.

General

• Name:  date
• Label:  Date
• Namespace:  http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
• Registration Authority:  Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
• Notes:  Typically, «date» will be associated with the creation or availability of the resource. Recommended best practice for encoding the date value is defined in a profile of ISO 8601 [W3CDTF] and follows the YYYY-MM-DD format.

Best Practices

1. «Date» refers to dates associated with an event in the life cycle of the resource. Typically, «date» will be associated with the creation or availability of the resource. Whenever possible, define dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format. If the full date is unknown, month and year (YYYY-MM) or just year (YYYY) may be used.

Metadata Encodings Examples

• Resource Description Framework (RDF/XML)
  

  Example #1:
  
  <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
  <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf='http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#'
      xmlns:dc='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'>
  <rdf:Description>
      <dc:date>
      May 28, 2003
      </dc:date>
  </rdf:Description>
  </rdf:RDF>
  
  Example #2 (using W3C-DTF encoding scheme):
  
  <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf='http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#'
      xmlns:dc='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'
      xmlns:dcterms='http://purl.org/dc/terms/'>   
  <rdf:Description>
      <dc:date>
          <dcterms:W3CDTF>
          <rdf:value>1999-09-25T14:20+10:00</rdf:value>
          </dcterms:W3CDTF>
      </dc:date> 
  </rdf:Description>
  </rdf:RDF>

• XML (Tags & Attributes)
  

  Example #1:
  
  <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
  <record xmlns:dc='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'>
  <dc:date>
      May 28, 2003
  </dc:date>
  </record>
  
  Example #2 (using W3C-DTF encoding scheme):
  
  <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
  <record xmlns:dc='http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'
      xmlns:dcterms='http://purl.org/dc/terms/'
      xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'>
  <dc:date xsi:type='dcterms:W3CDTF'>
      1999-09-25T14:20+10:00
  </dc:date>
  </record>
  

• Crosswalks
  IEEE LOM: 2.3.3:LifeCycle.Contribute.Date (when Contributor.Role = 'Publisher')
  MARC: 260$c