Add “Retrieved”, “Last accessed” or similar information to authoryear in biblatex

Question

When citing online resources my university's regulation stipulates that we have to add information on when we accessed the specific website. This can for example be of the form "Retrieved: April 7, 2012".

When using the following simple setup for biblatex, is there a field in @online or so that allows me to have this printed automatically in the bibliography?

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}

Answer 1

As I recommend in the comment you need the field urldate. Here an example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@Online{ctan,
  label       = {CTAN},
  title       = {CTAN},
  subtitle    = {The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network},
  date        = {2006},
  url         = {http://www.ctan.org},
  urldate     = {2012-04-07},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{%
urlseen = {Retrieved},
}

\begin{document}
Text \cite{ctan}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

I also changed urlseen to your required string: "Retrieved".

If you want to format urldate you can use the following options of biblatex:

urldate=comp,dateabbrev=false

The result will be: April 7

The result is: