Use of initial articles in title starts with searches in Primo Advanced Search
Primo is currently unable to adequately accommodate initial articles (a, an, the etc.) when doing a title starts with search in Advanced Search.
The first title field that appears in the sort section of the PNX is used as the title that is matched against when doing a title starts with search but this leads to different outcomes depending on whether the records are indexed from PCI or Alma:
When the title field in the sort section of the PNX is created from Alma the default behaviour is to strip the initial article
When the title field in the sort section of the PNX is created from a PCI record the default behaviour appears to be to retain the initial article
This means that users cannot enter a title into this field that will accurately retrieve both PCI and Alma records as some titles start with an intial article and others do not. If the Alma records are adjusted so that the initial article is included then they will not sort correctly when sorting by title and users who fail to enter the initial article will not find the title they are looking for.
Primo should allow users to enter titles into the title starts with search box and it should retrieve all results that match the search terms regardless of whether the user has entered the initial article or not. Users should not be expected to enter titles with an initial article and then to do a separate search for titles without the initial article to ensure they have a complete set of results.
Simon Read
shared this idea
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Manu Schwendener commented
+1
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François Renaville
commented
Generally speaking, behavior should normally always be the same in the front-end wherever records are from (Alma or Aleph records vs PCI vs external harvested sources). Patrons should ideally not suffer from the origin of the records to have Primo functionalities working as expected (i.e. as they think they should work). Functionalities that are limited to a part of the whole content (e.g. Browse) are rarely understandable for patrons…
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Stacey van Groll
commented
Interesting! I hadn't noticed this before, and it's not very good :(
I agree that Alma changes are undesirable and I would think PCI data changes are unlikely given the scale, so the best option would seem to be to adjust the search index behaviour.
I found an example in our instance, and you're on the money that the PCI record includes the initial article in Sort, whereas Alma OTB norm rules strip it.
PCI
<display>
<title>The Power of Cities in Global Climate Politics: Saviours, Supplicants or Agents of Change?</title>
<sort>
<title>The Power of Cities in Global Climate Politics: Saviours, Supplicants or Agents of Change?</title>
Alma
<display>
<title>The power of cities in global climate politics : saviours, supplicants or agents of change? / Craig A. Johnson.</title>
<sort>
<title>power of cities in global climate politics : saviours, supplicants or agents of change? /</title>