[Metadatalibrarians] Initial articles in titles

[Joe Altimus]

Greta,

Using a program to identify initial articles in titles (whether in data
processing, indexing, or displays) will fail a small percentage of the time.
No matter how sophisticated one makes the program to deal with cases (e.g.,
titles such as "A is for American", "An Stalin" [a German language title],
"Thé français"), it's likely that some cases are not covered.

When data processing to generate MARC or MODS, I typically use programmatic
methods in association with human review to confirm that the marking of
articles is accurate. I do this to create scholarly level access in title
browses. But 100% accuracy may not always be required, or title browse
facilities may not be offered in some products, so using only programmatic
methods is sometimes acceptable.

Joe Altimus
Arizona State University Libraries

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Greta de Groat <gdegroat at stanford.edu>wrote:

> 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
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