(1974) In a title catalog, one can distinguish two sort orders: • In the
grammatical sort order (used mainly in older catalogs), the most important word of the title is the first sort term. The importance of a word is measured by grammatical rules; for example, the first noun may be defined to be the most important word. • In the
mechanical sort order, the first word of the title is the first sort term. Most new catalogs use this scheme, but still include a trace of the grammatical sort order: they neglect an article (The, A, etc.) at the beginning of the title. The grammatical sort order has the advantage that often, the most important word of the title is also a good keyword (question 3), and it is the word most users remember first when their memory is incomplete. To its disadvantage, many elaborate grammatical rules are needed, so many users may only search with help from a librarian. In some catalogs, persons' names are standardized (i. e., the name of the person is always cataloged and sorted in a standard form) even if it appears differently in the library material. This standardization is achieved by a process called
authority control. Simply put, authority control is defined as the establishment and maintenance of consistent forms of
terms – such as names, subjects, and titles – to be used as headings in bibliographic records. An advantage of the authority control is that it is easier to answer question 2 (Which works of some author does the library have?). On the other hand, it may be more difficult to answer question 1 (Does the library have some specific material?) if the material spells the author in a peculiar variant. For the cataloger, it may incur too much work to check whether
Smith, J. is
Smith, John or
Smith, Jack. For some works, even the title can be standardized. The technical term for this is
uniform title. For example, translations and re-editions are sometimes sorted under their original title. In many catalogs, parts of the
Bible are sorted under the standard name of the book(s) they contain. The plays of William Shakespeare are another frequently cited example of the role played by a
uniform title in the library catalog. Many complications about alphabetic sorting of entries arise. Some examples: • Some languages know sorting conventions that differ from the language of the catalog. For example, some
Dutch catalogs sort
IJ as
Y. Should an English catalog follow this suit? And should a Dutch catalog sort non-Dutch words the same way? There are also pseudo-
ligatures which sometimes come at the beginning of a word, such as
Œdipus. See also
Collation and
Locale (computer software). • Some titles contain numbers, for example
2001: A Space Odyssey. Should they be sorted as numbers, or spelled out as
Two thousand and one? (Book-titles that begin with non-numeral-non-alphabetic glyphs such as
#1 are similarly very difficult. Books which have
diacritics in the first letter are a similar but far-more-common problem;
casefolding of the title is standard, but stripping the diacritics off can change the meaning of the words.) •
de Balzac, Honoré or
Balzac, Honoré de?
Ortega y Gasset, José or
Gasset, José Ortega y? (In the first example, "de Balzac" is the legal and cultural last name; splitting it apart would be the equivalent of listing a book about tennis under "-enroe, John Mac-" for instance. In the second example, culturally and legally the lastname is "Ortega y Gasset" which is sometimes shortened to simply "Ortega" as the masculine lastname; again, splitting is culturally incorrect by the standards of the culture of the author, but defies the normal understanding of what a 'last name' is—i.e. the final word in the ordered list of names that define a person—in cultures where multi-word-lastnames are rare. See also authors such as
Sun Tzu, where in the author's culture the surname is traditionally printed first, and thus the 'last name' in terms of order is in fact the person's first-name culturally.) == Classification ==