Month or day of collection date

• by janrou

  I'm a bit confused about the day and month on the labels to transcribe. Please help me out!

  As an european engineer I write dates in two ways:

  1. Engineering date format:
     Year-month-day or YYYY-MM-DD. Today's is 2013-04-24 thus the day is 24 and the month is april.

  2. Common european date format:
     Day-month-year og DD-MM-YY. Today is 24-04-13.

  In these examples you see that the day and month have changed place compared to the american format.
  I assume that IX means month so IX-12-1964 is 1964-09-12 according to my engineering date format.

  Please state the format including examples.

  Posted April 24, 2013 11:22 AM

• by ghewson

  The date on the photo here looks like 7-12-37, so I'm not sure what you mean. The help text says entomologists use Roman numerals for the month.

  Posted April 24, 2013 3:51 PM

• by cerabilia scientist

  Unfortunately collectors were not good at standardizing dates. In this case it is July 12th 1937. He didn't use a Roman numeral and the month is not December since it would be too cold in WY to get this bug at that time of year. Every case needs a bit of sleuthing. Frustrating and fun at the same time. Thanks for your efforts.

  Posted April 24, 2013 4:53 PM