Web sites focus on time; help you check past, future dates

As the year is rapidly approaching its end, and as a new decade, century and millennium are appearing on the horizon, the topics of calendars and time seem relevant. The Web provides us with a number of timely information resources.

While conducting historical research, it may become necessary to convert dates from older calendar systems to the present-day Gregorian system, or vice versa. At the "Calendar Conversions" page http://genealogy.org:80/~scottlee/calconvert.cgi, you can enter any date and retrieve all equivalent dates in the Julian, Jewish and French Republican calendars.

If you are planning a future event and need to learn all the particulars for that date, you can visit the site "CalendarHome.com" http://calendarhome.com/tyc/. Select, for example, the 2000s under the "Choose different century" choice and enter your proposed month and year, let's say November 00. You will retrieve a November 2000 calendar, with some holiday dates noted to the side. If you click on "November 2000" at the top of the page, you will retrieve a larger calendar that you may print out and use for making notations. Back on the first page you retrieved, if you click on the right or left arrows adjacent to November 2000, you will retrieve calendars for previous and successive months. Also, if you click on "Calculator," you can enter any two dates and learn exactly how many days there are between them.

There also are some Web sites that pertain to clock time. The U.S. Naval Observatory Master Clock site http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/what.html offers a number of precise time choices, including "USNO Time in Standards Time Zones," "Converting from Universal Time" or even how to "Compute Local Apparent Sidereal Time." The "Date and Time Gateway" http://www.bsdi.com/date/ allows you to check both the date and time for numerous international sites.

Finally, to explore the history and nature of time, the National Institute of Standards and Technology offers "A Walk through Time, the Evolution of Time Measurement" http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/time.html, an illustrated chronicle of clocks and calendars over the centuries. Or, you might be interested in reading Joe Haninik's essay, "On the Nature of Time" http://home.earthlink.net/~ortech/time.html, which incorporates philosophy and theoretical physics.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the ASCIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Deborah Husted Koshinsky and Rick McRae, University Libraries