3.3.4.2  Date of Origin:  Roman to Arabic Numerals

Here's an occasion where our Bitter Experience is to your Advantage.  Initially DS-Access asked its cataloguers for the kind of date that the paleographers among you are used to seeing, the kind that Neil Ker specified in the introduction to his Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (1969-2002), and that Malcolm Parkes further emphasized in the introduction to his Medieval Manuscript of Keble College, Oxford (1979).  The system employs roman numerals for the century and, for the parts of a century, superscript numbers or abbreviations for Latin words, e.g., s. XV^ex for "saeculo quinto decimo exeunte" to indicate a manuscript to which the date has been assigned by the paleographer, the art historian, the cataloguer —in short, a manuscript whose date does not derive from a scribal colophon.  We were surprised (but we shouldn't have been) to discover that computer does not sort well on such dating conventions, hence the so-called Darling Feature, named in reminiscence of Mary Ealing at UC Berkeley who built it.  The Darling Feature automatically expands the roman-numeral system to a BeginDate and EndDate in arabic numerals according to a fixed table. A set of translated dates from the turn of one century to the turn of the next, as example, is provided in the Data Dictionary.