Bernhard Eversberg wrote: <snip> Karen Coyle said in that meeting: "... the team tried to figure out when alphabetical sorting was really required, and the answer turned out to be 'never'."
Does that mean alphabetical index displays of names, titles, subjects etc. can safely be considered dead? We've long suspicioned that non-librarians neither want them nor understand them in the first place. Decisions to abolish them should, however, not be based on suspicion but evidence. Do we have it? Is that team's conclusion evidence? If so, to the dustheap with non-sort markers and indicators! </snip> This would demand some research. I would say that LCSH, i.e. subject heading strings, lose most of their coherence when they are not browsed alphabetically (and even then they are difficult). With personal names, I would think that people would find it very helpful to arrange all of the Robert Johnsons by surname instead of by first name (Bob, Rob, Robbie, etc.), but I think we could learn a lot from Wikipedia on this. I just cannot agree that surname-forename "Johnson, Robert" is so foreign for people's understanding. I think alphabetical arrangement is highly useful for finding sub-bodies of corporate bodies. (Of course, all of this assumes cross-references) As far as book titles go, my research has shown that alphabetical arrangement is rather recent. In several card catalogs, there were no title added entry cards made, only for title main entry. And in earlier times, in manuscript catalogs, I often found that even title main entry was not used. If there was no clear author, these items got placed into the section "Anonymous, Pseudonymous, etc. Works" by order of acquisition(!!!!!). That was really bad. Browsing by title may not be that important today with keyword retrieval since people should be able to sort in other ways. I believe that is the only place for non-filing indicators (other than series titles), but I may be wrong? James Weinheimer j.weinhei...@aur.edu Director of Library and Information Services The American University of Rome via Pietro Roselli, 4 00153 Rome, Italy voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258 fax-011 39 06 58330992
