There are many different ‘date’ fields among the Citation Metadata: Publication Date, Production Date, Distribution Date, Date of Collection, Deposit Date. What is the meaning of these date fields?

In general, the meaning of the different kinds of dates listed in the Citation Metadata is as follows (this list roughly follows the order of the research process, in the Citation Metadata the various date fields make their appearance in a different order):

• Date of Collection: the date, or dates, on which the data in a dataset were collected, either for purposes of research or otherwise.
• Production Date: the date on which a dataset was created out of the data collected.
• Deposit Date: the date on which the depositor submitted the dataset for review and publication by DANS.
• Publication Date: the date on which a dataset has gone through the curation process and has been published in a DANS Data Station.
• Distribution Date: the date on which a published dataset is made available for consultation and reuse (e.g. after the end of an embargo period).

Of these dates, the Deposit Date and the Publication Date are generated automatically by the DANS Data Stations, rather than provided manually by the depositor. The Publication Date is the date used for purposes of citation. The Publication Date is therefore particularly important for duly referencing a dataset which is being cited in a publication.

Besides these date fields, there are two more metadata elements which indicate a date or a time period:

• Time Period, with Start Date and End Date (part of the Citation Metadata): these dates define the period which the data are about, such as for instance when the data cover some period in history.
• Temporal Coverage (part of the Temporal and Spatial Coverage): this is, again, the period which the data are about, but in this case the value is entered in free text rather than dates, allowing values such as, for instance, ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Corona Pandemic’.

PLEASE NOTE: due to the transition from EASY to the DANS Data Stations, there are some exceptions to the above mentioned definitions of the dates, which have been imported from EASY into the DANS Data Stations. This is the case for many datasets in the Data Station Archaeology, as well as for some datasets in the Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities dealing with historical censuses. Specifically, for these datasets the Publication Date is the date of publication of the original (paper) report which contained the data (in EASY: the ‘Date Created’), rather than the publication of the dataset by DANS. Consequently, these datasets may have a Publication Date (i.e. the date on which the original report was published) which is earlier than the Deposit Date (i.e. the date on which the dataset was submitted for publication by DANS).