authordate

Authordate is a term that appears in some bibliographic and metadata contexts to denote a date associated with an author. It is not a universally standardized field across major metadata schemas, and its precise meaning can vary depending on the data model or project. In practice, possible interpretations include the author's birth date, death date, a floruit (the period during which the author was active), or the year related to a notable work or publication by the author. Because of this variability, it is important to consult the documentation or data dictionary for the specific dataset or schema in which the term appears.

In data modeling terms, an authordate might be stored as a single date, a date range, or multiple values. For example, birth date could be represented as 1888-03-14, death date as 1965-07-01, floruit as 1900–1950, or a work-related date as 1925. Living authors may have a birth date without a death date, while deceased authors may have birth and death dates, and various projects might record an active period instead of exact dates.

Relation to standard metadata practices: in many widely used bibliographic standards (such as Dublin Core, MARC, or BibTeX), dates related to authors are typically handled by dedicated fields (birth date, death date, or active years) rather than a single generic authordate field. Consequently, when encountering authordate, it is advisable to verify the specific schema’s definition to determine what the value represents and how it should be interpreted. See also: birth date, death date, floruit, author-date citation.