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

On Jan 14, 2009, at 11:35 PM, Paul Kershaw wrote:

> ----- Original Message ----
>
> From: Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
> next letter uppercase!" than it is to write computer code that checks
> a lexicon for part of speech information and an exceptions list, etc.
>
> ====
>
> 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.