Tag: non filing characters

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The 20-MW TVA atmospheric fluidized-bed boiler / prepared by Tennessee Valley Authority ; principal investigators, A. Manaker, J. Bass. (OCLC #22758855)

The Library of Congress Classification and Shelflisting Manual Part G 63 describes the process of assigning Cutter numbers in an LC call number.

This work has title as its main entry, so will be cuttered based on the title; since the title starts with the article ‘The’, we’ll base the cutter off of the next word, ’20-MW’, which starts with a numeral.

The manual’s section on Cuttering for numerals says “When Cuttering for Roman or Arabic numerals, use the Cutters .A12 – .A19.” Since this title starts with the numeral ‘2’, I was considering .A12, but the next instruction says:

Because of the infinite range of numbers, choose a Cutter
toward the center of the available span when Cuttering for the first numeral in a class. This will allow room for both smaller and larger numbers. Follow this practice even with relatively low numbers since decimal fractions are filed in numeric order before the number 1.

There were no other titles (or authors) starting with numerals in this part of our shelflist, so I followed the advice and cuttered with .A15: 

   TH7140 .A15 1989
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Los Angeles residential architecture : modernism meets eclecticism / Ruth Wallach. (OCLC #913768383)

In MARC, we indicate the number of non-filing characters in the title using 245’s second indicator. For example, The cardturner would have 245 second indicator 4 to indicate that four characters should be skipped (The word ‘the’ and the space following it) and file it starting with the “c”, rather than sorting all of the “The…” titles together. Articles in other languages are also skipped.

This indicator seems like a value that could be easily detected/automated if the system knew which words were articles in various languages, which may be why it doesn’t appear in many newer cataloging frameworks. I worry that some would be detected incorrectly, such as in this title:

245 10 ǂa Los Angeles residential architecture : ǂb modernism
    meets eclecticism / ǂc Ruth Wallach.

Though “Los” is an article in Spanish, “Los Angeles” in this case is a single proper noun, so the word should not be skipped. (This particular case could be handled by also detecting the language, but a Spanish-language book about Los Angeles would have the same problem.)

I like Wikipedia’s method of handling this, which is to have a sort key (if it’s different from the main title) as a separate field:

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cardturner, The}}
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Le collier rouge : roman / Jean-Christophe Rufin. (OCLC #873465083)

This rush book came to me only needing a call number; fortunately, these are pretty straightforward for fiction from an established author. This author has an established class number/cutter in his authority record:

    053 _0 ǂa PQ2678.U357

so I only need to add a cutter for the title (with initial non-filing characters ignored):

    PQ2678.U357 C65 2014