RE: Initial Articles

["Jackson, Richard" <rjackson at huntington dot org>]

Maurine,

This has been discussed here a number of times, including significant threads in June 2002 and October 2003.  Search "initial articles" (with the quotes) in the archives and you will find quite a few postings.

There's no perfect solution to this.  A lot depends on the nature of your collection, particularly the amount of non-English language material, and on the likelihood that your patrons will forget to skip initial articles in title searches.  Some libraries increase the number of initial articles ignored in search strings; others (mine included) have opted to remove all initial articles from the list.

Richard V. Jackson
Catalog Librarian / Database Manager
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
1151 Oxford Rd., San Marino, Calif. 91108
(626) 405-2100 x2384   rjackson at huntington dot org


 -----Original Message-----
From: 	innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org [mailto:innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org]  On Behalf Of Maurine McCourry
Sent:	Wednesday, September 08, 2004 8:13 AM
To:	INNOPAC at innopacusers dot org
Subject:	Initial Articles

This seems like something that would have been discussed here before, but I couldn't find it in the list archives:  We'd like to expand our list of "Characters removed from beginning of user-typed search".  Currently, our list is "a ,an ,the ;".  We'd like to at least add Spanish, French, German, and Italian initial articles, and might want to add others as our collection becomes larger.  Just wondered if anyone had a more extensive list already prepared that they'd be willing to share.  Or if anyone has any warnings about doing this.

Thanks!

Maurine McCourry
Technical Services Librarian
Hillsdale College
maurine dot mccourry at hillsdale dot edu

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