#8: Check the cataloger's work on non-English materials →

From Emma:

This tip was, unfortunately, directly inspired by the Spanish media collection at one of the Dallas Public Library branches where I used to work. To make shelving easier, the DVD labels the system uses have the first letter of the title printed on the top edge of the spine. Despite the title of the original tip, I don’t want to blame our acquisitions people for what I’m about to complain about, because I suspect we get them pre-processed by Midwest Tape, the vendor where we buy our DVDs. For English-language movies, titles like The Princess Bride or The Pirates of the Caribbean come with the letter P on the label, but I noticed while shelving the Spanish DVDs that there were suspiciously large sections of Es and Ls (“el,” “la,” “los,” or “las” being the Spanish words for “the,” depending on the gender and number of the noun). Sure enough, “El laberinto del fauno” was under E instead of L, and “La buena vida” was under L instead of B.

My first thought was to see if I could run some kind of list in our ILS (library catalog software) that would capture everything with this problem, but I couldn’t think of a good way. I am confident that MARC records contain the full title of an item and also have a field for something like a ‘filing title’ that omits initial articles. Theoretically, then, you could pull those, compare them, and generate a list of non-matches that probably needed relabeling, but as a non-cataloger who got her degree in the newfangled lazy modern days of library science education, there is too much I don’t know about bibliographic records to efficiently pull those out.

Fortunately (for this specific purpose, not in general), our collection at that branch was small enough that I just brought a cart out, removed the Es and Ls, and changed all the labels that needed to be changed via the simple expedient of printing out the correct first letters from a Word document, cutting them out, and taping them over the label that the vendor sent us. Of course some of the collection was checked out at the time, so I had to keep an eye on the area over the next couple of months and do a few rounds of follow-up, but it wasn’t bad. Just like my efforts to change the language of the labels for non-English collections, this mainly came down to a tedious but important craft project.

Overall, this was an easy fix to implement and did not require much specialized knowledge or skill. It might have been a good project to give a helpful volunteer if your library had such a person available.

I’m fortunate to speak the dominant non-English language in my area, and I realize this would be harder if you didn’t, but it’s probably still doable. Even if you are working with a language that doesn’t use a Roman alphabet normally, if you are in a predominantly English-speaking country your ILS will probably be English-based and thus use MARC records with romanized transliterations/approximations of any ‘foreign’ text. Those records could be your starting point for working out what is being used for “the” and how that is reflected on the shelf.

I would really love to hear from someone who has looked into this with a language other than Spanish. Please make a submission if you’re out there and you have the time!