The little box beside Title field?

In honour of my second Thingaversary (this movie account) and the tenth one in a few days for my book account, I'm *finally* going to ask a question that's been bugging me for years :D (Though, not enough to ask sooner, apparently!)

So, when you edit the book information, there's a small box beside the Title field with a drop-down list. What's that for? What does it to and when's one supposed to use it?

It denotes the character on which the title is sorted alphabetically. E.g. if you own The Canterbury Tales then the drop-down will probably show 5, meaning the title is sorted under its fifth character, C, rather than the first character, T.

When entering books in English you don't usually need to do anything with this field, since the software automatically recognizes that it should ignore 'The' and 'A' when sorting alphabetically. However, if you have books in less common languages then the system might not ignore articles automatically. Then you can manually set the correct character on which to sort.

(Ed: it would be useful to label this field.)

There are a couple of places in English where it can be useful, for example, ensuring that A is for Alibi is sorted under A, rather than I. However, it's mostly an issue for other languages, where it's not always possible to ignore the articles. "Die" is one of several words for "the" in German. Ignoring it would mean Die Trying would be sorted under T. Of course that means something like Die Sterntaler-Verschwörung (The Sterntaler Conspiracy) is also sorted under D, unless it is changed manually. At one point, a double pipe (||) was used to indicate the sorting character, but it was later changed to the field beside the title instead.

> Until we got access to the sort field, German books automatically ignored der and das, but didn't ignore die, which was very confusing.

Thank you! Mystery solved :)

>4 MarthaJeanne: Also some of us are weird. I've always seen this ignoring part of the title as an artifact causing by librarians using card catalogues. Since I use a computer and not a card catalogue I've set the sort field to 1 for each of my books. (I'm a computer scientist, so really this is just librarians using a bad hash function to avoid hash collisions in the A and T drawers :-)