Why does a proceedings year sometimes differ from the year of the conference?

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In the context of a paper published in a conference's proceedings, a dblp record's ‹year› field has a different meaning than in all other contexts:

In case of an inproceedings record, ‹year› describes when the actual conference took place.
For all other items, ‹year› describes when the item has been published.

Hence, if the proceedings volume of a conference is not published in the same year as the conference is hosted, this will lead to a discrepancy between the ‹year› entries of the inproceedings and the proceedings records. The following example shows the situation for a typical post-proceedings volume:

<inproceedings key="conf/naa/Xiang08">
<title>Numerical Quadrature for Bessel Transformations ...</title>
<year>2008</year>
<booktitle>NAA</booktitle>
<crossref>conf/naa/2008</crossref>
...
</inproceedings>

<proceedings key="conf/naa/2008">
<title>Numerical Analysis and Its Applications 2008, ...</title>
<year>2009</year>
<booktitle>NAA</booktitle>
...
</proceedings>

We retain this (maybe unexpected) practice since a paper by an author named J. Smith that has been presented at a conference in the year, say, 2000, is commonly referred to as the "Smith, 2000" paper, regardless of when the actual post-proceedings volume appeared as a published product. A paper's year of publication can still be retrieved from the ‹year› field of the referenced (see ‹crossref›) proceedings record.

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