I’ve developed a method for documenting academic sessions such that they are alphabetically sortable while also being human readable. This is very helpful for the knowledge management system that I use in my teaching and academic work.
The assumption is that the academic year starts in the fall, and continues to spring and summer of the next year. This is the schedule typical in the U.S. education system.
Typically, the current semester might be referred to as Fall 2022, and next semester would be Spring 2023. If you sort those alphabetically, next semester comes before the current semester.
Instead, I suggest documenting sessions by the year range, 2022-23; and then the session name or abbreviation. This will sort as:
- 2022-23 FA(ll)
- 2022-23 SP(ring)
- 2022-23 SU(mmer)
- 2023-24 FA(ll)
- …
This will not work as smoothly if you need a session for winter, but there are two other options. Instead of the string winter, you could use IN which exists both in the word winter and would also be an abbreviation for the Spanish word invierno with the same meaning. Alternatively, you could simply use numbers to identify the sessions which is more common in Asian universities.
- 2022-23 I (Fall)
- 2022-23 II (Winter)
- 2022-23 III (Spring)
- 2022-23 IV (Summer)
You can still include a full session name after the number of the session and maintain sort order to take advantage of both increased readability and quick search functions.