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