Godmar, I'm surprised you're asking this. Most of the questions you want answered could be answered by a basic programming construct: an if-then-else statement and a simple decision about what you want to use in your specific application (for example, do you prefer "text" with the period, or not?). About the only question that such a solution wouldn't deal with is "which fields are derived from which others", which strikes me as superfluous to your application if you know a hierarchy of preference. But perhaps I'm missing something here. Roy On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Roy Tennant <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >>> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:14 PM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >>> >>>Similarly, the date associated with a record can come in a variety of >>>formats. Some are single-field (20080901), some are abbreviated >>>(200811), some are separated into year, month, date, etc. Some >>>records have a mixture of those. >> >> In this world of MARC (s/MARC/hurt) I call that an embarrassment of >> riches. I've spent some bit of time parsing MARC, especially lately, >> and just the fact that Summon provides a normalized date element is >> HUGE. > > That's great to hear - but how do I know which elements to use? > > For instance, look at the JSON excerpt at > http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/help/api/search/response/documents > > "PublicationDateCentury":[ > "1900" > ], > "PublicationDateDecade":[ > "1970" > ], > "PublicationDateYear":[ > "1979" > ], > "PublicationDate":[ > "1979." > ], > "PublicationDate_xml":[ > { > "day":"01", > "month":"01", > "text":"1979.", > "year":"1979" > } > ], > > Which one is the cleaned up date, and in which order shall I be > looking for the date field in the record when some or all of this > information is missing in a particular record? > > Andrew responded to that if given, PublicationDate_xml is the > preferred one - but this raises the question which field in > PublicationDate_xml to use: .text, .day, or .year? What if some are > missing? > What if PublicationDate_xml is missing, then I use or look for > PublicationDate? Or is PublicationDateYear/Month/Decade preferred to > PublicationDate? Which fields are derived from which others? > > These are the types of questions I'm looking to answer. > > - Godmar >