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Re: Vague dates

Probably tto late for most people, but here goes anyway.

I have just noticed that when we migrated our data from Recorder 3.3 (via 3.4) to recorder 6, a lot of event data came across which had vague dates of type M (month only e.g. June). This intrigued me beciase this is a date type which we would almost never use, so I l;ooked closer and found that in every case (nearly 2000 events) the difference between the start and end dates was a value between 29 and 31. In other words these vague dates should in fact be of Type O (month and year e.g. June 1987).

I have since corrected them with a batch update.

I guess this is a problem in Recorder 6, whether part of the import addin or elsewhere.

Beware.

Rob Large
Wildlife Sites Officer
Wiltshire & Swindon Biological Records Centre

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Re: Vague dates

I sense something here, that's going to trouble me...

M

Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre
Tullie House Museum

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Re: Vague dates

It's not really hard to fix Matt, but first try to find out if it is a problem for you.

You need to search the field SURVEY_EVENT. VAGUE_DATE_TYPE for records with the value M. Then try to identify whether these events came from Recorder 3, then check whther they actually had a year in the original recorder 3 date. If you find you do have a problem I can talk you through the fix. Of course if you have some data which actually should be type M then that might be harder (we didn't fortunately).

I can easily imagine how this might happen when someone was coding the export or import routines, I mean to my mind M = month only and O = month and year looks easy to confuse.

Rob Large
Wildlife Sites Officer
Wiltshire & Swindon Biological Records Centre

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Re: Vague dates

'30 odd' candidates.

Doable.

M
:/

Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre
Tullie House Museum