Naming Convention for Documents

Guidelines

Document Naming Format: YYYYMMDD-Subject-UniqueNumber 

• Example: 20200315-mtpleasant-publib-001

Include the following bullets in one string of text without spaces: 

• Date: YYYYMMDD
• Subject of Document: Provide a brief descriptive subject of the file. Feel free to abbreviate in a way that makes sense for your department (abbreviation examples: publib, smith_jane, museum).
• Unique number: If you have more than one document within the same subject, add a unique number to your document name. In this case, a three-digit number is likely enough, but you may need more depending on your document collection (unique number examples: 001, 022, 333).

Important note: Try to favor hyphens ( - ) over underscores ( _ ). The reason is hyphens can allow text to wrap, but underscores will cause layout problems like text spilling out of its container and possibly covering up other things on the page. To put it another way, hyphens behave like spaces. Underscores behave like letters. This can be observed in the example on this page, with a blue dashed outline showing the container boundary.