Approximate years of publication [#859848]

Working with historical publications the exact year of publication is often not known. It would be great if the year of publication could handle things like "circa 1510" or "between 1520 and 1530".

Comments

Comment #1

lfreitas commented 11 April 2011 at 00:42

I'd like that too.

Sometimes I need to put things like "[197-?]" and I can't, because it would be odd in the year filter.

Comment #2

adraskoy commented 11 November 2012 at 22:13

I went a non-drupal route for bibliographic information, in part due to this issue. I'm looking at a return to drupal and the biblio module, and am wondering if anyone has suggestions on how this might be dealt with. I'm happy to do some coding if someone familiar with the module thinks this can be done. I'm thinking along the lines of having a year that's encoded as normal, and another optional free-form text field that would be printed whenever the date is viewed.

E.g. 1510 is the year recorded, but "circa 1510" is printed. 1525 is given as the year, but "between 1520 and 1530" is printed. For most entries you wouldn't need the optional field.

Comment #3

pkiff commented 12 November 2012 at 19:37

Can you achieve what you want using the two currently existing date fields in biblio: biblio_year and biblio_date? They more or less are already set up to contain data the way you describe. They are stored in the MySQL database as text fields, not real date fields. The year holds the year and the date holds some freeform version of date text whose format varies depending on what the source of your records is. For most purposes, you should be able to sort records by biblio_year and then display the date as biblio_date.

To control how the two dates are displayed, you should be able to edit whatever output style or CiteProc style you are using. Where necessary (depending on the publication type and your preferred output style), you might have to replace the use of biblio_year with biblio_date.

If that doesn't meet your needs, then you could instead use one of the custom biblio fields to hold this alternate freeform date data, and then add that field into your style instead. To control how records are sorted when you want to sort by dates at a more granular level than years would almost certainly require having a third date field: one for the year, one for a sortable full date (including partial elements if they exist), and one for freeform text. There is some possibility for the creation of your own Views with current versions of biblio, and these would allow some more sorting options, but I would guess that editing the CiteProc or output styles would be cleaner and allow integration of your new citation display across more displays.

Phil.