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

[Stephen Hedges]

Excellent point, Ambrose!  And it seems like it shouldn't really be that
hard, since that subfield indicator is stored in the marc_subfield_table
as the second character in the tag_indicator column.  Once you have a list
of biblionumbers returned by Search.pm, you could check them against that
column to see if any leading characters in the title need to be skipped.

This solution has the great advantage of leaving control of the title
order in the hands of the catalogers.

Stephen

Ambrose LI said:
> 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/
>