Work titles change depending on which LT site you view them on

Clearly a bug, a work needs to have a single unchanging title.

Do you mean, different language sites? This is definitely NOT a bug it was a feature to show the title in the language of the site if one exists, unless your referring to different English titles when the book does not have a native one...

I believe khms is referring to this topic in the Site Improvements Group.

It seems intentional, but I still say it's a bug - it's flat WRONG.

Absolutely not. Calling it the "Da Vinci Code" although it has well known names in dozens of other languages is pedantry. Libraries don't do it. Bookstores don't do it. Publisher's don't do it. Good grief, am I to force Greek titles on every high-school copy of Plato's Apology?

How would you do it? Always use the most common version, even if that means most works have to be titled in English for everyone, so that for example Germans on the .de site would see The Magic Mountain rather than "Der Zauberberg"? Always use the title in the original language, so that Americans are baffled by Tolstoy's Война и миръ or Sun-zi's 孫子兵法 instead of War and Peace and The Art of War?

ETA- Oops, Tim said the same thing (but more quickly!)while I was typing.

Although your argument is convincing, Tim, dressel26's examples are way cooler.

(hangs head in shame)

What about a way to indicate what the main work title is, along with the country/language title? :)

Yes, it should do that. It actually did before, but I didn't move it over from the old work code. I'll see about it.

Absolutely not. Calling it the "Da Vinci Code" although it has well known names in dozens of other languages is pedantry. Libraries don't do it. Bookstores don't do it. Publisher's don't do it.

You sure of that?

The one variant of actual works titles I can lay my hand on here is the following kind of note in many of my German books - approximately equivalent to the LoC notice in US books:

CIP-Kurztitelaufname

der Deutschen Bibliothek



Gardner, Erle Stanley:



Perry Mason und das ambulante

Aktmodell: klass. Krimi /

Erle Stanley Gardner. Übers. von

Ingeborg Hebell. - Neuaufl. d. dt.

Orig.-Ausg. - Frankfurt/M, Berlin, Wien:

Ullstein, 1979.

(Ullstein-Bücher; Nr. 1978:

Ullstein-Krimi)

Einheitssacht.: The case of the reluctant

model >dt.>

ISBN 3-548-01978-1

Note that it calls the work The case of the reluctant model >dt.> - this doesn't seem to be the German title.

Touchstone: Perry Mason und das ambulante Aktmodell and The case of the reluctant model and Erle Stanley Gardner.

I hate HTML. That should have been <dt.> in both cases.

And it should be "The case of the reluctant model" for the work; "The case of the reluctant model <dt.>" is the German edition (titled "Perry Mason und das ambulante Aktmodell").

And I HATE what this system does when editing a post which might contain things like &lt;dt.>!

And an addition for people who don't speak German:

"Einheitssacht." (short for "Einheitssachtitel") means approximately "unified object title". "dt." (short for "deutsch") means German.

And I freely confess I have no idea what they do when the original title isn't in a latin alphabet. I don't think I can lay my hands on an example. As a wild guess, maybe they'd use a latin transliteration of the original.

Not to beat a dead horse, but people have requested titles do display in the language of the parent site, they were happy with it and those unhappy seem to be in the minority.

Tim (post #10) -- I did notice the original-language titles, but they're still not back. There's one book I have which apparently has an English title of The Pretentious Young Ladies, but my copy (.../book/15558697) is actually *in* the original language and has the French title -- Les Precieuses Ridicules -- on the cover. And I'm certain that Don Quixote was called something else when it was first published all those multitudinous years ago.

I'd like to see the original titles back where they were.

11, 12 13, 14>

I don't think the title of the acutal work is completely relevant here. Since, you're citing from a specific catalog, it's the book title that really counts, i.e. "Perry Mason und das ambulante Aktmodell" in this case.

As far as I've seen, the uniform title is not something that is consistently added to every work in the German catalogs I sometimes use, e.g. Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund and Deutschen Nationalbibliothek don't seem to always add a uniform title of a book.

The Dutch catalogs I use don't have a field like this at all. If they do mention the title of the original work, then it's usually part of a remark field, which may also contain other data.

I'd really like to see the MARC record for this one ...

Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists it as follows:

---------------------------------------------------------

Treffer gesamt: 1

1. Gardner, Erle Stanley:
Perry Mason und das ambulante Aktmodell : klass. Krimi / Erle Stanley Gardner. [Übers. von Ingeborg Hebell]. - Neuaufl. d. dt. Orig.-Ausg.. - Frankfurt/M, Berlin, Wien : Ullstein, 1979. - 157 S. ; 18 cm
(Ullstein-Bücher ; Nr. 1978 : Ullstein-Krimi)
Einheitssacht.: The case of the reluctant model <dt.>
Aus d. Amerikan. übers.
ISBN 3-548-01978-1 kart. : DM 3.80
SG: 08a
Signatur: F D 79/22697
IDN: 790813424

---------------------------------------------------------

Also, you'll notice that they allow searching by Einheitssachtitel, which also finds this record.

>18 khms:

Different libraries use different MARC fields for original title (240, 241, 304 etc.). It depends which MARC format they use. Some libraries don't use any special field, but some general note field. Some libraries don't enter the original title at all. Whether it is possible to search by original title depends also on how the search indices are defined for the library's OPAC.

The Dutch libraries don't use MARC format. They have their own system for entering metadata. I don't know if they have some special way of indicating the original title. If I search for title Southern cross (novel by Patricia Cornwell), the search doesn't find the Dutch title Zuiderkruis even though the English title is mentioned in the note field.

Where do you get that Dutch libraries don't use MARC? They surely do.

My local Nassau County (ALISWEB - http://www.alisweb.org/ ) libraries list a Uniform title.

Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress has the Uniform title of "Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise. English"

Well, given that the interface to the DNB is found at http://z3950gw.d-nb.de/ , I strongly suspect that there *are* records around in some derivative of MARC.

Incidentally, it seems DNB is not currently available as a source. Would it be possible to change that?

>20 timspalding:
I'm not expert on this, but don't they use Pica+ format in Dutch libraries? Pica+ is not MARC format. At least they say so e.g. in this document:

>20 timspalding:
I'm not expert on this, but don't they use Pica+ format in Dutch libraries? Pica+ is not MARC format. At least they say so e.g. in this document:
A review of metadata: a survey of current resource description formats: Pica+.