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. So 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. That is, 01/01/25 will be followed by 01/02/25 and 01/03/25.

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.

You can use any punctuation to separate the year, month, and day. For example, you can use a period (.), hyphen (-), or forward slash (/).

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: You can use the keyword TO in your search query to search for ranges. For example:
[2021.05.01 TO 2021.05.31]

Note: You will only find records that match the date format in your search. If you use different date formats across your collection (for example, 23 May 2021, 23.5.21, 23/5/2021, 2021.05.23, 2021/05/23), you will need to search for each format.