Document management systems typically have a document name field and also a separate document date field. The document name and the document date are used together to identify the document but the date is a separate field so that it can be used by the document management system to arrange documents in chronological order when such ordering is specified. Also having a separate date column in lists of documents aids readability.
A map typically does not have an exact date because it is the result of surveys carried out over many months so when published the map is simply given a year only.
A plan of a particular site produced by a land surveyor may take a day or two of measurement on site and then further work on a computer back at the office so typically such surveys are produced labelled with a month and year.
Some documents must actually have an exact date but it is not possible to establish when that exact date was and so only an inexact date can be given for them. A non-digital photo taken decades ago must have been taken on some specific date but, although there may be some indication of date - for example the photo might show the presence of, of lack of, a permanent structure whose year of construction and/or year of removal are known - the exact date the non-digital photo was taken is usually unknown.
When loading documents to a document management system and assigning a date for that document within the system, the objective is to assign an exact date, if that is known, and otherwise to assign an inexact date making clear that it is an inexact date and avoiding giving an inappropriate impression of degree of precision.
At the final tribunal hearing of a dispute subject to litigation various pieces of evidence will be considered by the tribunal which may have a bearing on exactly when a particular crucial document was produced, if that is a matter of dispute between the parties, but at the earlier stage when documents are being loaded to a document management system the objective is to assign exact dates where they are reasonably certain (e.g. a letter will have the date printed at the top which, in the absence of any indication of mistake or fabrication, is taken to be the exact date) or inexact dates where those can be ascertained in a fairly straightforward way (e.g. a photo may show a child whose birth year is known and whose age can be estimated from the photo) without making undue assumptions or employing inferences which are liable to be disputed in the litigation.
So these are some of the reasons why a document held in a document management system may be assigned an inexact date and why a document management system should, ideally, cater for the possibility of a degree of imprecision in the date of some documents.
It would be possible for a document management system to be designed so that the user could choose only to enter a year for a document (or only to enter a year and month for as document) and avoid entering a full date - year, month and day-of-month - where that is not known. However most document management systems require full dates to be entered - year, month, and day. There may be the option to not enter a date at all, but in most systems all dates which are entered have to be full exact dates. However some systems, although requiring a full date internally, allow you to opt to show, for selected documents, only part of the entered date (e.g. just the year or just the year and month) in document lists, and in filenames of generated downloads, which are produced for external use - i.e. produced for sending to other people or as backup. This is in order to avoid giving the recipient a misleading impression of precision. The idea is that the full date determines where the document sits in the order of documents when chronological arrangement is specified, but that only those parts of the date which are known to be accurate are actually displayed. So if a document is known to be dated sometime in 2006 but the month and day-of month are not known, 01-07-2006 could be typed in (roughly in the middle of the year) for sorting purposes but only 2006 - the only part which is known - is displayed. Or, to choose another example, if it is known that a document is dated sometime in September 2006 then 15-09-2006 could be entered to be used for sorting purposes but only Sep 2006 would be displayed.
Some document management systems (such as Bundledocs), whilst requiring full dates to be entered in the date field for sorting purposes, provide an option for only partial dates (year and month, or year only, or circa year) to be displayed as illustrated below:
Document date field typed in Document date field displayed Document Name field Download filename
23-12-2004 23 Dec 2004 Letter Smith to Jones 2004-12-23 Letter Smith to Jones
14-02-2005 Feb 2005 Handwritten note 2005-02 Handwritten Note
24-06-2005 2005 summer Handwritten note 2005 summer Handwritten note
01-07-2006 2006 Handwritten note 2006 Handwritten note
01-01-2008 2008 circa Handwritten note 2008 circa Handwritten note
01-01-2010 2010 circa Handwritten note 2010 circa Handwritten note
The word circa is a well known way of indicating that a date or year is only approximate. Although there is no exact definition of how approximate circa indicates a year to be, generally circa accompanied by a round-figure year - i.e. a year ending with a zero - indicates a lesser degree of precision (perhaps of a decade or more) than circa accompanied by a year which does not end in a zero.
With systems like this you need to add a tilde symbol (~) meaning "approximate" to indicate that the exact date is unknown, any exact date entered is for sorting purposes only, and all that is actually known for certain about the date is what follows the tilde, e.g. Feb 2005, or just 2005.
Here are some examples:
Document date field typed in Doc date field displayed Document Name field Download filename
23-12-2004 23 Dec 2004 Letter Smith to Jones 2004-12-23 Letter Smith to Jones
01-02-2005 1 Feb 2005 ~ Feb 2005 Handwritten note 2005-02-01 ~ Feb 2005 ~ Handwritten note
01-07-2005 1 Jul 2005 ~ summer 2005 Handwritten note 2005-07-01 ~ summer 2005 ~ Handwritten note
01-01-2006 1 Jul 2006 ~ 2006 Handwritten note 2006-07-01 ~ 2006 ~ Handwritten note
01-01-2008 1 Jan 2008 ~ circa 2008 Handwritten note 2008-01-01 ~ circa 2008 ~ Handwritten note
01-01-2010 1 Jan 2010 ~ circa 2010 Handwritten note 2010-01-01 ~ circa 2010 ~ Handwritten note
It is good practice to use 01 as the day-of-month in the sorting date for each document with an inexact date to make those documents stand out. If the exact month is unknown use 01 for the month as well.
You can send an explanatory note like this with the download:
Please note that where a filename commences with a date which ends with -01 ~ the tilde character (~) indicates that that full date before the tilde is an approximate date for sorting purposes only and anything which is reasonably certain about the date of the document, e.g. Feb 2025 or perhaps just 2025, will be set out after the tilde.
And an appropriate note can also be used when sending out an index or list of documents. Some systems (such as Litigation Ready) have the ability to display partial dates in indexes and lists but not in download filenames. This is so that when the download is extracted into a folder the documents appear in the same sequence as in lists. In this case you can use the partial date option for display in index and lists and a note is necessary only for downloads.
Sets of documents identified by year
If you have a set of documents identified by year which set of documents would naturally be in a section/folder by themselves then a neater way of dealing with inexact dates would be to leave the date field empty and rely on alphanumeric sorting of the name field to achieve chronological order for the set of documents in the section, like this:
Document date field typed in Document date field displayed Document Name field Download filename
1954 Map 1954 Map
1962 Map 1962 Map
1972 Map 1972 Map
1980 Map 1972 Map
but this method is not suitable if the set of documents needs to be interspersed with other kinds of documents in the same section which do have exact dates.
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