Date Handling

[MicheleTobias]

Background: Zotero accepts dates in a multitude of formats so there can be a variety of formats in any given citation collection. Currently we handle this challenge by converting the date data to a character type so the date is displayed in the table as-is. This, however, means that the dates are not very useful for analysis (such as in the Time Manager plugin... and oh my! wouldn't that be cool to pass this data to the Time Manager plugin?).

Goal: Find a way to handle a variety of date formats so that they are usable as a date

Ideas:

• Convert all existing dates to just Year in the table (but don't alter it in Zotero)

• Have the user select which date format they want and convert all of the dates to that format in the table (but don't alter it in Zotero)