The "Summer 1996" I would consider a chronological designation. In fact some journals use only an indication of year, month, season, etc. as the only designation. We propose also adding a date (if we used Karen's suggestion, it would be called subDocDate) to include such designations. That date could be structured or unstructured (i.e. as text). If structured it could be expressed as YYYYMMDD (used in MODS as encoding=iso8601) or YYYY-MM-DD (encoding=w3cdtf), or we could even consider an encoding=marc and use coded data from the MARC holdings format (there is indeed a method to encode Summer 1996 using a convention defined in MARC: (see: http://www.loc.gov/marc/chrono_patterns.html), where seasons are defined as: 21 Spring; 22 Summer; 23 Autumn; 24 Winter.) That's probably going a bit too far but it is available. If the only designation is chronological the question arises whether the information goes in subDocDate or gets parsed like volume and issue. (I would suggest the former since then it could follow the other encodings for dates). Rebecca On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Bruce D'Arcus wrote: > On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 02:10 PM, Karen Coyle wrote: > > > An example of a use of these records would be in citation software. > > Depending on your citation style the enumeration may be expressed as > > "1993, > > v. 3, n. 7" or "3:7, 1993". That's easier to do if the captions are > > separate (or even eliminated, which citation software seems to do). > > Exactly. In general, you want pure numbers to allow for just the > flexibility you note, but you also want to leave for room -- as you say > -- for things like "Summer," which ought to just be a straight text > field. > > Bruce >