I can hardly believe this is my third thread on this subject. I started with a mild Pit of iTunes, another in IHMO when others said iTunes doesn’t sort the way I claimed, and now this thread when my whole concept of alphabetization is been threatened.
Consider this list:
I ain’t a man.
I am a man.
I’m a man.
I’m not a man.
It is my understanding that this is correctly sorted in ascending alphabetical order by the rules I was taught by the nuns way back when (though they would have hit me for using ‘ain’t’).
If you put these sentences into rows in an Open Office spreadsheet and sort them in ascending order, they remain as they are. And I believe the same is true of Excel based on memory, though I don’t have a copy any longer to test it and my memory both.
However, iTunes disagrees. iTunes would sort this way if these were song titles.
I’m a man.
I’m not a man.
I ain’t a man.
I am a man.
In another thread Bob Ducca found an Alphabetizer tool for lists that agrees with iTunes.
Alphabetizing is a style. There are lots of styles and no individual one is more correct than any other. You pick the one you want and use it consistently.
That’s the only GQ answer. People can get wrought up about this issue, and I bet it’s an entire course in library school. But if it’s consistent it can’t be wrong.
The difference is simply the question of how to deal with nonalphabetic characters. Systems have variations.
The first list alphabetizes spaces before the apostrophe.
The second list alphabetizes apostrophes before spaces.
There is no definitive way to do this, since nonalphabetical characters have no definitive order (letters of the alphabet, kayT, do have a definitive order, so must stick to it).
I just found this page with two claims: first, that the Chicago Manual of Style is “an important authority in the American publishing community”; and second, that it agrees with me – apostrophes are to be ignored in alphabetization. Therefor I’m and Im are effectively the same word for sorting purposes.
Are there other manuals of Style that disagree with this?
What I’d like to do is get the names of other well known manuals of style, and see if there is any conflict on this point that I can find online. This page notes several, but all are for writers in specific fields like law. The two most relevant seem to be the AP manual for journalists, and the MLA manual for writers in the humanities. If you can suggest others, please do.
I’m having a very hard time finding any references in these style manuals it alphabetizing contractions – everything I see refers to how or when they should be used, which is not the issues.
I’ve found more than a half a dozen sites agreeing with me, and none against, other than the tool that Bob Ducca found in another thread. None seem particularly authoritative on their own, but in degree of unanimity they seem pretty compelling. All but one say ignore the apostrophe when alphabetizing. These include the filing and index standards for several corporations.
The one in conflict uses an example that’s a little off point, as it is referring to a possessive and not a contraction – it says Aunts should precede Aunt’s.
So, can anyone find any reasonable cite which disputes ignoring the apostrophe when sorting?
Even if you find ten manuals who agree with you, someone who does it another way isn’t wrong. If they made up their own idiosyncratic system, one that puts W before C, by definition they aren’t wrong. They may not persuade others to follow them, but that doesn’t make them wrong. This isn’t an argument you can win.
I’m not arguing. I’m asking if anyone can find a reference that treats apostrophes any differently in matters of sorting. If I’m arguing with anyone at this point, it’s with me.
For most sorting that is done now, Manuals of style don’t matter – computer collating codes are what matters.
These are the codes that determine which characters sort in what order. Since most sorting is done just by computers, the order of these codes determines it for most sorting.
In both ASCII (PC’s & Internet) and EBCDIC (mainframes), space comes before apostrophe which comes before letters or digits. So both of them would sort to your first list. (There are lots of methods in computer programming to allow other collating sequences, or to skip non-alphameric characters, etc. But most sorting uses the default sorting sequence.)
When I took an indexing class back in grad school we were told to find out what the house style was and go by that - in other words, sure there are different ways to alphabetize (word-by-word, also called nothing before something, versus letter-by-letter, also called all-through, being the two main divisions.)
I once sat on a committee to work out a national standard for sorting, but it turned out in the end that we all had different needs (libraries, telephone directories and what have you) and that the task was impossible (and unnecessary).
It’s merely academic now, but I was a user of card catalogs for decades. You could clearly see that the rules changed over time. If you were looking for a name that began with Mc, Mac as a prefix, or Mac as the first three letters of a name, as well as the similar Von (as in Von Vogt) and Von (as in Vonnegut), you had to search several possible sections because some were filed in one place and some in another. United States as part of a title was handled in several different ways. I remember these frustrations even though they are decades old.
I know that the local library system bought sets of cards from the Library of Congress so these confusions had to have propagated throughout the country. Somebody could have gone through all the cards and resorted them, but that would have used up a full-time expert for months. There was an in-house office that handled the cards so some expertise was available.
However the system worked, alphabetizing was an enormous part of librarianship in the old days. The experts had to be taught somewhere from someone. So how and when did it happen?
I seem to recall being taught in gradeschool to treat all variations of “Mc-” as thought they were spelled out “Mac”. This was a small christian school in the 80’s using the Beka books.
Procrastinating on library school final project right now, so I thought I’d contribute.
You can certainly take library courses on cataloging, and even take specialized courses entirely about cataloging from scratch rather than copy-cataloging (which is what most librarians do now). You no longer HAVE to take extensive courses in cataloging to be considered a professional librarian.
There are two changes that I see contributing:
First is that the systems are so automated, and so many records are online now, it’s just not important for rank-and-file librarians to be able to create catalog records. There’s usually a specific technical services or cataloging department, and that’s where the people are who know all that really detailed stuff. Even in there, there is probably at least one library professional who works with copy-cataloging instead of original record creation.
Second is that there’s just so many specialized niches for librarians now - school librarians, children’s librarians, archival librarians, information systems librarians… the list goes on. All of those specific branches need to be taught, so if you axe the complex cataloging requirements (that not many librarians use anyway) you have lots more space in your school course list for more specialized topics.
ETA - as for alphabetizing, I bet it started the way a lot of styles started. Some strong-willed and opinionated person started doing it one way, bullied everyone else into going along, and then trained new people in that method so that it started to get passed down. I don’t think that alphabetizing systems are entirely standardized between libraries, however, so that doesn’t necessarily matter. Our library uses the word-to-word method and ignores apostrophes.
