Re: ISO 8601 timestamp format for PREMIS eventDateTime values

[Peter Van Garderen]

On 11/18/2010 02:09 PM, Joseph Perry wrote:
> Evelyn,
> Currently I have...
> <eventDateTime>2010-11-18T21:58:27.036734</eventDateTime>
>
> This is the default isoformat by python.
>
> isoformat('T')
>
> Your example was...
> <eventDateTime>2010-09-01T09:09:00-02:00</eventDateTime>
>
> Is what I currently have acceptable/correct. Or does it need to change?

Yes, Joseph, Python is giving us the correct ISO format. Please continue to use
'T' as the character to use as the date/time value separator. This is as per ISO
8601 best practice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

We can ignore the timezone offset in Evelyn's example because MCP is recording
the timestamp as UTC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC

That means we can reformat for any other timezone offset after the fact. Keeping
the microsecond value (decimal value after seconds) only adds to the accuracy of
the timestamp so I don't see any harm in keeping that if that is the default
we're getting from the Python library.

Cheers,

--peter