Think about the shoebox of old photos in your closet, or the letters from a grandparent you never quite got around to organizing. Chances are, a lot of those items don’t come with a clear date attached. Maybe you know it was “sometime in the 70s.” Maybe you’re pretty sure it was 1984, but not certain. Do you guess a date just to have something to enter, or leave it blank and let the item disappear from timelines and search? Neither option feels right, because neither one is honest. That’s why we’re bringing EDTF, or Extended Date/Time Format, to Permanent.org in the next few months.
Enter the date you actually know
EDTF is a standard for partial and uncertain dates, originally developed by the Library of Congress and now part of ISO 8601, the same international standard behind most digital date formats. In plain terms, it gives you a way to record exactly as much as you know.
With EDTF, you’ll be able to enter a full date like before, or just a month, a year, a decade, or a range. You can also mark a date as a guess or an approximation. For example, “1984?” means probably 1984, “1984~” means approximately 1984, and “192X” means sometime in the 1920s.
This will work right alongside the exact dates you’re already using, so nothing you’ve entered before needs to change. We’re also planning to bring this same flexibility to location fields by the end of the year, so you can describe a place that might no longer exist or choose a region instead of a pinned location.
Guessing isn’t the same as knowing
If you’ve ever worked on a family tree, this idea might already be familiar. Genealogists have used similar tools for years through GEDCOM, the standard family tree file format, with terms like ABT (about), EST (estimated), and BET (between). EDTF is the archival version of that same idea, and it gives community archives, family collections, and historical projects a way to catalog their materials honestly instead of inventing precision no one can verify later.
Built the way serious archives are built
EDTF isn’t a workaround. It’s standard practice at some of the most respected archives in the country, including the Library of Congress, the Digital Public Library of America, the Boston Public Library, and university archives nationwide.
This update is one piece of a bigger effort at Permanent to build the kind of infrastructure that serious archives run on, alongside work we’re doing with Archivematica for digital preservation workflows and Webrecorder for web archiving. The exact-date field you’ve used until now wasn’t wrong. EDTF simply extends it to cover the cases every real archive eventually runs into, so the same level of precision used by major institutions becomes available to every member.
Start where you are
We’ll share a full announcement once EDTF is live, along with knowledge base articles walking through exactly how to use it. Look for those in the coming weeks. In the meantime, it’s worth thinking about which dates in your archive you’ve been guessing at, and which ones you actually know with more or less certainty. When EDTF arrives, you’ll be ready to record them the right way.
