Designing a Flexible, Standards-Adherent Date Field for Novices and Professionals
Permanent.org is a cloud-based digital preservation system aimed towards the general public. Though Permanent.org has a date field within its metadata for members to edit the creation date of the files they upload, there are many pain points that result in a somewhat-negative user experience for our members. Permanent strives to create a date field experience that allows for the many use cases of the platform. Balancing the needs of multiple different audiences with dates can be a challenge. Some Permanent.org members are professional archivists who prefer to use specific metadata standards, while a novice member may not know about or care to use a specific standard. People who upload born-digital material may care about the time something was created, whereas a family historian may only know a year or month for an old family photograph. This poster will explore our current progress on redesigning our date field to be flexible enough for our members but still adhere to archival and software best practices and standards for dates.