New User Questions

What is the purpose of the Sort From dropdown to the right of the Title field on the Edit Your Book screen? How is it used?

>1 Stonekiller: It tells the computer what character you want the title to sort by when sorting alphabetically by title. So for "The Great Gatsby" if you wanted the computer to sort it starting with the G in 'Great', you'd set the sort character as 5. ('The' is 3 characters and the space between 'The' and 'Great' is the 4th character, making the G in 'Great' the 5th character.) For titles that you want to sort by the 1st character, you can just leave the field blank. Blank = 1st character.

Further to >2 coprime:, it is programmed to set automatically when a book gets added, detecting "The " and suchlike, so you'll possibly find some are already set even if you didn't deliberately do anything.

It essentially is a smarter way than needing to wrangle with titles in the format "Book Title, The" just for alphabetical purposes, allowing us to leave that as "The Book Title" and set its sort character to 5 if we want it to be under "B".

>3 Nevov: I know of at least two other ways of indicating how to sort titles like that. Some systems have a marker sign that tells the system to start the sorting from there.
I.e. The * Great Gatsby, where * is the special marker sign.
Some systems also have a (show "this" but sort it as "that") construct, Typically indicated as some special pair of parentheses.
I.e. (The Great Gatsby == Great Gatsby)
Once in a while they show up in library imports, so now you know what's going on, next time you see stuff like <<Det >>Bedstes bøger.
in a marc file.
Ah, that was a third way of doing it. Using a special pair of parentheses to ignore parts of the title when sorting.

>4 bnielsen: A pipe (|) is what we used to use here, and will still work. I have a lot of books in German, and the system would mark 'der' and 'das', but not 'die'. I think I have gotten rid of most of my pipes, but there may still be a few I've missed.

Every now and then you might need to correct the automatic setting. A is for Apple ought to sort on 1.

It's also worth noting that the combine pages sort by full title. So if you want to combine Great Gatsby, The with The Great Gatsby you have to scroll down a ways.

>5 MarthaJeanne: I remember from the 1970's being slightly annoyed at the local library over the sorting of catalogue cards that "hid" some books from me. Ever since I've just wanted a search tool that can find books no matter which crazy sort order librarians have come up with :-) And all my LT books have sort character = 0.

I do have read so many books that I recognize that sorting is a problem. Mostly with translated/translitterated author names. Evgenij Evtusjenko might be published under Jevgenij Jevtuchecko or Yevgeny Yevtuchenko or maybe event the Cyrillic version, so books by him might end up in three or four different locations in a public library.
I like to keep systems simple, so maybe that's okay.

And now that we can change the sort character, you have that choice. As for me, I can be quite sure of a title, but not know if it has an article, and if so which, so sorting without the article makes good sense.

Oh, yes, those Russian authors! And not just. I'm currently interested in an author born in the Netherlands, spent most of his life travelling around the Holy Roman Empire and back and forth to Rome. Just look at Petrus Canisius His birth name was Pieter Canis, but once grown he used the latin form. You will see that he is published with various forms of Peter, and with or without Saint (in various forms).

>7 MarthaJeanne: Yes, I have that too. I usually just put the author name I prefer somewhere in the comments, so I can search for that and find all of the authors books.