As-of date

The as-of date is the timestamp that makes a records claim honest: the date through which the underlying source had published when the fact was read. Because every municipal system publishes on its own lag — recorded instruments in weeks, enforcement items on agency cycles, datasets on refresh schedules — a fact without its date is unfinished, and two sources compared without aligned dates can manufacture phantom findings.

The discipline extends to absence: 'no record as of' is a checkable statement about a file at a moment; 'none' is an assertion about the world that records cannot support. Professional records work dates everything, and treats the freshest slice of any dataset as the least complete — because it is.