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}}
