Author: Jason Casden casden@gmail.com; release date: Aug. 2002.
This is a Perl script that will normalize dates in an existing finding aid to ISO 8601. It reads in the content of a unitdate; element, then creates and inserts a normal ="" attribute. It is still in the beta test version, so comments are welcome.
The script will work with most date formats familiar to archivists. Any unrecognized date formats cause the script to pause, and prompt the encoder to enter the normalized form of the date. This will create the normal ="" attribute, while leaving the displaying date in the "nonstandard" format.
Please note that it has only been tested in Windows with ActivePerl 5.8.3.809. It requires the XML::Twig and HTML::Entities modules. After saving the file on a Windows machine, you might need to add the extension ".pl" to the script in order for it to run.
