Understanding Dates in Bibliographic Records
The Church History Library follows current professional archival standards for cataloging. Accordingly, when researching archival records in the Church History Catalog, you will see dates displayed in various formats in order to follow such standards. From date ranges to approximate dates to content and creation dates, here is a breakdown of date formats used in the Church History Catalog.
Types of Dates
A creation date is the date the archival record was made. This is the date that appears at the top of the record you are searching.
Content dates are the dates discussed within the record. You will find these dates in the summary note.
Creation dates and content dates can be different from each other. For records such as biographies, reminiscences, or histories, records are written after the event(s) described in the records. Thus, the creation date is later than the content date.
Often, however, the creation date and the content date will be the same. In this case, you may see a date range displayed at the top of the record and single dates listed for various events in the summary.
Additionally, a date range or span indicates that the records cover a span of time, such as a mission journal that covers the entire length of a missionary’s service.
Components of Dates
Single dates can be a single year; a month and a year; or a month, a day, and a year, formatted as YYYY MONTH DD, as in the example below.
Sometimes we collect records for wards or other organizations in which there is a gap in the date range. To avoid confusion and false information, if there is a gap of 10 years or more, we will indicate that in the creation-date field; however, if there are more than three separate date ranges, we will use an inclusive date range instead to avoid cluttering the title field. In this situation, please look at the individual components of a record to find the dates you’re looking for.
You may see bulk dates for large collections that include a long date range; the bulk date indicates that most of the documents in the collection fall within a smaller range of the larger date span.
Estimating Dates
We try hard to give all our records at least approximate or circa dates, but sometimes there is just no good way to date a record that comes into the library. Those records will be labeled “undated” in the title field. Note in the example that Johnson is talking about his mission in 1898 (the content date), but we don’t know when he wrote the actual reminiscence (the creation date).
Approximate dates are labeled with the word circa prior to the date. This can be a single date, a year, a date range, or even a combination of dates.
