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Introduction to the FRUS Dates Project

Since its launch, the Foreign Relations of the United States digital archive has offered series-wide full-text search. Until now, the online repository has lacked a date-based search tool and chronological sorting of search results. For years, these highly requested features have been technically infeasible due to the absence of reliable machine-readable dates for all documents within the FRUS corpus. As a result, the Office of the Historian deferred date-based features and focused on other goals–most notably, completing the digitization of our historical print archive. With over 400 of the 550+ volumes now encoded as TEI XML (as of August 2017), we amassed a representative sample suitable for thorough review and analysis of the variety and occasional complexity of FRUS document dates.

“Metadata is a love note to the future”

In October 2016, the Office’s Digital Initiatives team launched the FRUS Dates Project to review dates across the series. As of August 14, 2017, 222,891 of the 233,684 documents (95.4% of the archive) contain machine-readable dates in a format suitable for date-based searching and sorting. (Research on the remaining 10,793 documents is ongoing.) As we prepared to integrate this data into the history.state.gov’s main search interface, the Office released a proof-of-concept search interface for experimentation.

As of December 11, 2017, the new, advanced search interface incorporates date-based search and sort: https://history.state.gov/search

Project Wiki

This wiki is intended to provide FRUS Dates Project documentation, reference examples, and (eventually) training exercises for HO editors familiar with typeset FRUS documents.

Table of Contents

• Project Description

  • Phase 1

  • Phase 2

• Date Encoding Practices

  • Tagging dateline dates in retrospectively digitized volumes

  • Tagging dateline dates in newly published volumes

  • Sources of Information

  • Date and Time Formatting

  • Date Complexity

    • Adoption of Gregorian Calendar

    • Calendar Examples and Conversion Resources

  • Time Complexity

  • Date Encoding Tutorials

    • Module 1: Date and Time Formatting

    • Module 2: Datelines, Dates, and Analytics

    • Module 3: Imprecise Dates

    • Module 4: Undated Documents

    • Practice Exercise 1

    • Practice Exercise 2

• Useful XPaths

• Schematron Rules

• Issue Tracking

• External Resources