Editing Library catalog (section)

== Sorting ==
{{Further|Collation}}
[[File:Librarian at the card files at a senior high school in New Ulm, Minnesota.jpg|thumb|Librarian at the card files at a senior high school in [[New Ulm, Minnesota]] (1974)]]

In a title catalog, one can distinguish two sort orders:
* In the ''grammatical'' sort order (used mainly in older catalogs), the most important word of the title is the first sort term. The importance of a word is measured by grammatical rules; for example, the first noun may be defined to be the most important word.
* In the ''mechanical'' sort order, the first word of the title is the first sort term. Most new catalogs use this scheme, but still include a trace of the grammatical sort order: they neglect an article (The, A, etc.) at the beginning of the title.

The grammatical sort order has the advantage that often, the most important word of the title is also a good keyword (question 3), and it is the word most users remember first when their memory is incomplete. To its disadvantage, many elaborate grammatical rules are needed, so many users may only search with help from a librarian.

In some catalogs, persons' names are standardized (i. e., the name of the person is always cataloged and sorted in a standard form) even if it appears differently in the library material. This standardization is achieved by a process called [[authority control]]. Simply put, authority control is defined as the establishment and maintenance of consistent forms of [[Nomenclature|terms]] – such as names, subjects, and titles – to be used as headings in bibliographic records.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|url=http://www.dictionary.com/browse/authority-control|title=Authority Control|encyclopedia=Dictionary.com Unabridged|year=2017}}</ref> An advantage of the authority control is that it is easier to answer question 2 (Which works of some author does the library have?). On the other hand, it may be more difficult to answer question 1 (Does the library have some specific material?) if the material spells the author in a peculiar variant. For the cataloger, it may incur too much work to check whether ''Smith, J.'' is ''Smith, John'' or ''Smith, Jack''.

For some works, even the title can be standardized.  The technical term for this is ''[[uniform title]]''. For example, translations and re-editions are sometimes sorted under their original title. In many catalogs, parts of the [[Bible]] are sorted under the standard name of 
the book(s) they contain.  The plays of William Shakespeare are another frequently cited example of the role played by a ''uniform title'' in the library catalog.

Many complications about alphabetic sorting of entries arise. Some examples:
* Some languages know sorting conventions that differ from the language of the catalog. For example, some [[Dutch language|Dutch]] catalogs sort ''IJ'' as ''Y''. Should an English catalog follow this suit? And should a Dutch catalog sort non-Dutch words the same way? There are also pseudo-[[Typographic ligature|ligatures]] which sometimes come at the beginning of a word, such as [[Œdipus]]. See also [[Collation]] and [[Locale (computer software)]].
* Some titles contain numbers, for example ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)|2001: A Space Odyssey]]''. Should they be sorted as numbers, or spelled out as ''<u>T</u>wo thousand and one''?  (Book-titles that begin with non-numeral-non-alphabetic glyphs such as '''#1''' are similarly very difficult.  Books which have [[diacritics]] in the first letter are a similar but far-more-common problem; [[casefolding]] of the title is standard, but stripping the diacritics off can change the meaning of the words.) 
* ''[[Honoré de Balzac|de Balzac, Honoré]]'' or ''Balzac, Honoré de''?  ''[[José Ortega y Gasset|Ortega y Gasset, José]]'' or ''Gasset, José Ortega y''?  (In the first example, "de Balzac" is the legal and cultural last name; splitting it apart would be the equivalent of listing a book about tennis under "-enroe, John Mac-" for instance.  In the second example, culturally and legally the lastname is "Ortega y Gasset" which is sometimes shortened to simply "Ortega" as the masculine lastname; again, splitting is culturally incorrect by the standards of the culture of the author, but defies the normal understanding of what a 'last name' is—i.e. the final word in the ordered list of names that define a person—in cultures where multi-word-lastnames are rare.  See also authors such as [[Sun Tzu]], where in the author's culture the surname is traditionally printed first, and thus the 'last name' in terms of order is in fact the person's first-name culturally.)