Temporal Coverage Element Help

Definition

The temporal coverage field indicates the time period and/or years which is the subject of the described item. In most cases, this does not indicate the years the item was created, but rather the years the subject matter of the item covers. For documentary films or photographs, though, this is often the same as the years and timeperiod within which the item was created.

Form Elements

In the online templates, this element appears as below:

This form element allows the user to enter the name and the beginning and ending years for a date range which describes the subject of the material.

An alternate form of this element appears below and excludes the option to include the year ranges:

Best Practices

If the template provides access to the faceted subject terms, and specifically the chronological subfacet, then this should be additionally coded under one of those facets. If the time period is from an authority list or has a source, this is particularly encouraged.

If the date range is not well-established the starting and ending dates should be entered. If the element does not break these subelements into seperate entry boxes, enter the date range within parantheses.
For example, "Baptist War ( 1831-1832)" or "Atomic Age (July 16, 1945 - )"

SobekCM / MODS Encoding

Due to a lack of this specific type of data in the MODS schema, this data is encoded entirely in the custom SobekCM bibliographic description section of the SobekCM METS file.

<sobekcm:Temporal>
    <sobekcm:period start="1939" end="1945">World War II</sobekcm:period>
</sobekcm:Temporal>

<sobekcm:Temporal>
    <sobekcm:period start="1000" end="1300">High Middle Ages</sobekcm:period>
</sobekcm:Temporal>

Metadata Mapping

MARC to MODS Mapping

This field is not mapped from MARC. MARC does encode chronological data in the subject fields (648, 65x). This data is imported, but it is imported into the subject keyword structure.

MODS to MARC Mapping

If the year range and time period are NOT present in any of the subject keywords for an item, then this data is encoded as an uncontrolled 648 chronological subject field. If both the years and time period exist, the years are mapped into the |a subfield and the time period mapped into the |y subfield.