[OPEN-ILS-DEV] LC Sort

[Mike Rylander]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 8:58 PM, Jason Etheridge <jason at esilibrary.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Grant Johnson <fgjohnson at upei.ca> wrote:
>> Are the results of a call number search sorted by LC in 1.4?
>> Or does the shelf browser still need some work?
>
> Hi Grant, as far I as know, outside of the reporting system call
> numbers get sorted based on the individual alphanumeric characters
> without any knowledge of their structure.
>
> However, the main thing that is needed is for us to define a function
> that can compare two call numbers and tell us which if any should come
> before the other.  Such functions can be plugged into the generic sort
> function in languages like Javascript and Perl very easily.  I'm sure
> something similar can be done with Postgres for sorting within the
> database, perhaps with stored procedures.

Well, there's the question of how to compare call numbers from
different schemes.  Picking one and sorting on that would be easy.
Making that configurable so you can choose exactly one out of several
potential schemes per Evergreen instance is possible.  Dewey, LC and
SUDOC inter-sorted together?  Not so much...  Thus, ASCIIbetical it
remains.

(Unless someone knows of specific rules for normalizing across
schemes, which I don't imagine is really possible.  I hope I'm wrong!)

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com