RE: Initial articles in foreign languages

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Well, III does follow the 245 second indicator in indexing titles, which is what the indicator is supposed to control. So 245 03 An affair to remember gets indexed simply as "affair to remember".
The OPAC options setting deals not at all with indexing, but rather with search behavior. I'm old enough to remember when catalog users had to be trained to leave off leading articles. This is still the case with Worldcat. This OPAC option was an attempt to unburden the user from learning and remembering that particular rule.

A library can still set the OPAC option to null, so that your catalog will operate exactly like Worldcat -- the input search has to match the indexed string exactly or you don't get a hit. The burden of identifying and dropping true leading articles will rest with the user.

Sounds like what you're really asking is that the search engine 1)parse the user's search string to identify potential initial articles 2) pre-identify potential hits and then 3) refine the search results based on indicators in the found MARC records before presenting the final hit list to the user. I honestly don't know of any catalog vendor who's reached that level of sophistication.

The search engine can only strip one leading article per title. This gives rise to a work-around for problem titles (like those beginning with "A-Z", "Los angeles", etc.) where the library inputs an additional 246 30 with a title like "An An A-Z directory", Los los angeles, An an die Romer, etc. Or you could define a special leading article like /__ (slash-space-space)in the OPAC options and place that at the beginning of these added entries -- as long as you are reasonably confident that combination of characters won't occur in nature.

Mary

Mary M. Strouse
Head of Technical Services
Judge Kathryn J. DuFour Law Library
The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC
(202) 319-5547 strouse at law dot cua dot edu
http://law.cua.edu/library/










-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org
[mailto:innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org]On Behalf Of Gene Fieg
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 5:08 PM
To: 'IUG INNOPAC List'
Subject: RE: Initial articles in foreign languages


Once again, if III's system could read a MARC record directly, we wouldn't
have this problem. So if you have a 651 #0 Los Angeles (California), the
system should know that it is indexed under "Los." The example given is a
fine example of a the fact that III only has defacto skip characters. We
have the same problem with books entitled An die Romer (To the Romans).
Because English articles are automatically defaulted (A, An, and The), we
move to "die" in the display. However, the MARC record would have 245 10 An
die Romer; the second indicator shows that An should not be skipped, but
with III's automatic "thinking," that just does not happen.



Gene Fieg
Cataloger
Claremont School of Theology
gfieg at cst dot edu

-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org
[mailto:innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org] On Behalf Of Strouse, Mary
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 1:53 PM
To: IUG INNOPAC List
Subject: RE: Initial articles in foreign languages

This is controlled under system options -- OPAC options -- characters
removed from beginning of user typed search. See the manual at #101879. See
also #101346.

Unlike a, an and the, foreign articles have complexities (beyond the
infamous case of a title beginning with the letter "A"). For example Los
can be an article or part of a proper noun (Los Angeles). The system can't
distinguish between the article La and LA. An article in one language may
be a preposition in a different (or in the same) language.

Does anyone have a good, well-tested list of "safe" foreign articles to
share?

Mary

Mary M. Strouse
Head of Technical Services
Judge Kathryn J. DuFour Law Library
The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC
(202) 319-5547 strouse at law dot cua dot edu
http://law.cua.edu/library/



-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org
[mailto:innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org]On Behalf Of Bellinger,
Christina
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 4:16 PM
To: innopac at innopacusers dot org
Subject: Intitial articles in foreign languages


Dear Colleagues,

I know that this has been discussed before, but I cannot find the
discussion in the list archives.

We are wondering we are not able to search titles beginning with
articles in languages other than English, even though the language codes
and skip characters are set correctly. For example, to search Die
hattisch-hethitischen Bilinguen in our catalog we have to drop the
initial Die. When we search with the initial article Die, the system
retrieves several titles as if they began with die, but which actally do
not begin with die. For example, a search on Die Hattisch ...
retrievies a list including Die Hoffnung, which is actually part of the
name/title added entry for:

Valen, Fartein,|d1887-1952.|tAn die Hoffnung

A search on An die Hoffnung retrieves the same list of titles that
appear to begin with Die, until one looks at the records.

Does anyone know how to get III to treat foreign initial
articles in the same way it treats English language ones?

Christina Bellinger

University of New Hampshire



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