[Koha-devel] Re: Requested feature (biblio title order)

[Ambrose LI]

In article <41E78307.8060006 at free.fr> you write:
>
>In 2.2, when you order a search by title, stopwords at the beginning are 
>still used in the ordering.
>"A simple software" will be ordered before "The last minute".
>In France (& I think in other countries it's the same), we are supposed 
>to have "A" and "The" ignored at the beginning of the title having
>"(A) simple software" after "(the) last minute".

The "pedantically correct" way to do this would be to encode the number
of characters to skip in the second indicator field in the MARC record.
In traditional MARC-based systems, this second indicator field is used
to control how many characters to skip when sorting.

The advantage of this is that sometimes words like "A" and "The" should
not be ignored (e.g. if the library has multilingual collections and
the title in question happens to be in a language where "the" is a
real and very important word).

The disadvantage of this is firstly of course Koha does not support
indicators, and most likely the semantics of such skipping may need
to be more concretely defined (e.g., what to do when the title begins
with non-ASCII Unicode characters) before it can be useful, and lastly
this is much more work :-(

Regards,
Ambrose

-- 
Ambrose LI Cheuk-Wing  <a.c.li at ieee.org>

http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/