Re: USAGE: Title Case [Was: USAGE: YAEUT: "proper"]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:50:25 -0600, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>On Jan 14, 2009, at 11:35 PM, Paul Kershaw wrote:
>> Along the same lines, I've seen cataloging software for books,
>> etc., that ignore "A" and "The" at the beginning of titles for
>> alphabetizing, but it's more unusual for it to ignore articles in
>> other languages (Le, La, Les, L', El, Der, Die, Das, Den, Dem, Des,
>> etc.). Even with just the English to deal with, a book called "A is
>> for Apple" would be put incorrectly under "I." And if the software
>> ignored foreign article and my DVD collection happened to include
>> "Die Another Day" and "Die Fledermaus," the catalog wouldn't know
>> to put the first one under D and the second under F unless the
>> database had a language marker as well. Ditto "Des Henkers Bruders"
>> under H but "Des voisines" under D; "Les Lives" under LE but "Les
>> miserables" under M; etc. (Some of these examples are from IMDB,
>> which does put "Des Henkers Bruders" under H but "Des voisines"
>> under D, which makes me curious. They may have a separate, hidden
>> database field for "Alphabetize as...," which is
>>  the most obvious thing to do.).
>
>I believe the MARC format used by (some?) libraries has a field which
>tells the software how many characters to skip at the beginning for
>alphabetization purposes.
Over at this one music wiki that's been eating much of my time lately, we
simply conflate "article" with "first name". Sounds like pretty much the
same thing.

John Vertical