Date and Time Use Cases

Statens Museum fur Kunst

Date and Time Requirements

These requirements have informed the development of a prototype at SMK.  It is used to generate date information based on the elements selected.  This tool is based on an existing tool within their collections management system.  The specification is described in the power point slides above.

1. Date entry in our current system generates Display strings in a predictable way.

In CollectionSpace, however, everything must be manually entered.

Action: Create a date display entry module to add on to CollectionSpace which can generate display texts.

Update 07 Sept 2010: A prototype has been created for this module.

2. Date text is more detailed than the date ranges.

Typically this seems to be because there was confusion over how to enter a month/year in the current system.

Example : SMKDate id 484685. "From" and "To" dates identify a whole year, but the text identifies a single month. Text is "August 1961". "Date from" is Sunday, 1 January 1961 (22282) ,"Date to" is Sunday, 31 December 1961 (22646).

Action: Try to provide a means for users to enter month (and seasons) in a way which the current system does not.

3. CollectionSpace date format does not have room for some SMK date information. 

The datetype and dateextent fields from the current system describe two sets of strings which are used to help the user generate a display text. If we don't save this data, we cannot present the user with the expected user interface when editing data.

Action: We will not store this data. User can create a new date if they want to edit the old one via our interface extension.

4. Representation of dates in the current system.

Dates stored in the current system are represented as integers, in such a way that 0 = 30.12.1899, 1 = 31.12.1899 etc. (This is the same way dates are represented in most spreadsheets such as Open Office Calc and MS Excel so these programs can be used to quickly examine dates exported from the current system).

5. Mapping to CollectionSpace date format.

There is no explicit mapping to the SMK date format described in Kim's mapping spreadsheet. The decision has been taken to use the Date - earliest/single,  Date - latest and Date text fields to represent all SMK date information (examples are shown below).