One approach is to make use of a scheme such as the OpenURL standard uses: see http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/Standard.htm, specifically the Initial Registry Content document, section 8.1 "Key/Encoded-Value Metadata Format to Describe Journals". In short, one has four fields available: date, which can take an ISO 8601 date ssn, encoding a season code quarter, encoding a quarter number chron, capturing some non-normalized form of an enumeration or chronology Your example would be: date=2003 ssn=winter The SICI standard had instead of this a YYYYSS format for year and special code, which is somewhat less satisfying in that it overloads six-digit number from merely year and month. cheers, nigel Bruce D'Arcus wrote: > Quick question: > > What's the best way to the code the date for a journal article where > you have something like "Winter 2003"? > > Bruce >