RE: Initial articles in foreign languages

["Stephen McLaughlin" <sMcLaughlin at sfpl dot org>]

I admit I'm on shaky ground here (hey, I live in California, after
all!), but it is my understanding that there are two separate things
going on with initial articles, and it seems to me that the discussion
of this problem has been confused by a lack of distinguishing between
these two things.

First, there is the non-filing indicator in the MARC record, which
Innovative recognizes and uses in indexing the titles, i.e., if there is
a non-filing indicator of 4, Innovative does not index the first four
letters of the title, no matter what they are. All well and good,
flowers bloom, the sun shines, and everybody is happy.

The problem seems to arise from the second thing that happens, and
that's the Innovative "skip" feature. This relates NOT to the MARC
record, but to the search string entered by the user. That is, if the
skip feature is set to ignore the word "the," it will ignore it whenever
a patron enters that word as the first word of a search. Very nice if
the patron enters "the agony and the ecstasy," but not so good if the
title in question happens to be Vietnamese, where "the" is not an
article. The worst case, and the one we're all fond of quoting, is the
problem with "A to Z" titles, but again the problem here is not that
Innovative is ignoring the MARC record -- the title is correctly indexed
with "A" as the first character of the title -- but the fact that the
skip feature is saying "Ah! This user has entered a title staring with
'a,' which I must ignore in looking for matches because this is one of
the things on my list of initial words to ignore."

The skip feature is intended to compensate for user search errors, but
of course it bollixes up searches as well. I believe that it is possible
to turn off the skip feature, which would mean that you could search "A
to Z of Snarklegrabing," but it would also mean that the next patron who
searches on "the agony and the ecstasy" will get not-very-helpful
results. You pays your penny, and you takes your chances....

I hope that made sense. If I have erred in interpreting things, please
let me know!

Steve McLaughlin
San Francisco Public Library
smclaughlin at sfpl dot org