[Koha-zebra] Zebra and non-filing characters

[Paul POULAIN]

Sebastian Hammer a écrit :
> Joshua Ferraro wrote:
> 
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> This is just generic question regarding Zebra's handling of
>> MARC non-filing characters. I know there is a 'stopwords'-like
>> function available using the 'map' directive:
>>
>> map (^The\s) @
>>
>> but I'm wondering whether Zebra is also capable of examining the
>> non-filing character specs within each MARC field to decide
>> whether to index or not to index ...
> You mean using an indicator in the field to determine how many 
> characters to skip? To the best of my knowledge, this is not supported 
> at present, sorry.

Would really be a nice feature, at least for MARC-lover catalogers (that 
still exists !)

> What I don't like about that approach anyway is that it leaves it 
> ambiguous what happens when the user put a leading article into a search 
> term... I think yu'd be better off just configuring the system to ignore 
> the most common leading articles as described above.

pro : will work even if the cataloger forget to set the indicator & 
makes them more and more useless.
con : MARC-lover catalogers will hate such a behaviour, because there 
are few exceptions. I think i can assume the noise french catalogers 
will make ;-)

> It is true that this would require separate configuration for different 
> languages, but you probably wouldn't get around that anyway, since many 
> non-English-speaking countries use other record formats than MARC21, and 
> the use of indicators to control indexing is not universal.. the Danish 
> MARC (cleverly named DANMARC) format, for instance, use a special 
> character inside of the subfields to mark the part which should not be 
> indexed.
In what is already developped in Koha 3.0, we will clearly have 
UNIMARC-french, MARC21-english, and probably other MARC-language 
flavours. So I agree with you.

Happy new year to everyone, with lot of free software & happiness !

-- 
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)