Primo does not work with some date formats used for old material and rare books.
Primo does not work with some date formats used for old material and rare books. The biggest problem is that Primo only recognises 4-digit dates and does not accommodate date searches for pre-1000 dates that have 3 digits or less. This issue greatly inhibits searches for a significant number of users of archives and rare material collections.
Primo also does not work well with dates in square brackets that include text and unknown dates that have a question mark or dash instead of the wildcard character ‘u’ - e.g. [i.e. 1973], [between 1772 and 1802?], 195? or 195-. These are all valid date formats that follow international bibliographic standards and are frequently found in bibliographic records. It would be beneficial to our users if these issues could be addressed and fixed.
Helen Barrell
shared this idea
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Maurine McCourry
commented
This is a problem in Primo VE, too, and a big one. I agree it needs to be treated as a bug, not an enhancement.
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Stacey van Groll
commented
I agree with Manu that this is a defect if Primo is not making the data meaningful for UI.
The normalisation rules should adjust for this, in adjusting the date to cover the range.
For example, if you check the PNX of a record with 199-, it can be seen to be adjusted to 1990 for sort and search, while it will display as 199- per the source record permitted cataloguing.
As another example with 260 ##$a[Vancouver :$bDuthie Books,$c199-?-1994], the range will be <startdate>19900101</startdate> <enddate>19941231</enddate> -
Manu Schwendener commented
In my opinion this should qualify as a bug fix instead of a feature request.