[Metadatalibrarians] Initial articles in titles

[Greta de Groat]

Hello again,

thanks to everybody who replied to my question re splitting subject strings.

Now i'm wondering if anybody's preprocessing stream includes  
programmatically  finding initial articles and splitting them off (in  
MODS) in a <nonSort> sublement, or in MARC splitting, putting in the  
2nd indidicator.

Or does your display ignore initial articles in browsing? I notice  
that iTunes, among others, do that, so there are commercial products  
that are making this attempt.

I'd like to hear the pros and cons of each approach.  And how do you  
deal with non-English languages?  Ignore them?  Apply to all and hope  
for the best?  Use a language code to pick an appropriate list?

thanks

Greta de Groat
Discovery Metadata Librarian
Stanford University Libraries