Accession date field

The Accession date field records when the object became part of your collection.

Field details

Visibility: Private field
 Field ID: accession_date
Search example: accession_date:2019
Field type: Text field with 40-character limit
Field location: Detail tab in the object cataloguing page

Catalogue tips

The accession date could be when an object was accessioned, donated, or given an object number.

You can enter words and numbers into date fields. You can record either precise dates (such as 1 June 1964) or imprecise dates (such as March 1990 or 20th Century).

Dates are stored as text and can only be sorted alphabetically. If you want to sort your records by year and month or search for precise date ranges, you should enter dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD. For example, you should enter 2025-02-01 instead of 01-02-2025 or 1 February 2025.

Using the YYYY-MM-DD format means your records will be sorted like this:

2025-02-01
2025-02-02
2025-02-03

If you enter dates in the DD-MM-YYYY format and sort your records by that date field, then all the dates starting with 01 will be in order, regardless of the month, like this:

01-01-2025
01-02-2025
01-03-2025

You should use a hyphen (-) or period (.) to separate the year, month, and day. We don’t recommend using a forward slash (/) as this has a special meaning in the search index and can cause problems.

It's important to be consistent with whatever date format and punctuation you choose.

Search tips

You can search on this field with its ID:

accession_date

For example, enter accession_date:2019 into the search field to find all accession dates containing 2019.

Note: For more advice, see Search on date fields.