Noel is right.
Also, I note that when sorting songs, iTunes ignores "The" but not "A" So "A Foggy Day" goes in the A's, but "The Look of Love" goes in the L's.
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
On 23 Aug 2004, at 12:50 AM, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
Here's another weird convention that I just learned about, apparently directly descended from the original Real Book practices. You know that it is common for libraries to omit the first article in a title for cataloguing purposes, like "A Foggy Day" is listed under F, not A.
I know from when I worked in a library during high school, that there used to be a set of relatively standard conventions in library catologuing, of which ignoring a initial definite or indefinite article was one. Treating author names beginning with "Mc" as if they began with "Mac" was another. I know that over the years I have seen an increasing number of instances where these older customs are no longer observed. While rhe "real book" may not observe the older customs, I am not prepared to accept that this is either the source, or the first instance, of the change.
I believe that the abandonment of these older customs is related to the computer, and intitial development of on-line catalogs on mainframe computers, and has something in common with the "y2k" non-phenomenon of several years ago. Memory for data storages, and for holding the part of a program which was active was so expensive that keeping programs as compact as possible was a significant design consideration. In an effort to keep code and data as compact as possible things that seem trivial to implement today, such as the algorithms to implement ignoring an initial definite or indefinite article were not included, and by the time computer memory was cheap enough to allow implementation of these older customs, there was a significant database full of records under the new scheme.
Thus, in my view, the Real Book is an instance of this change, not the source.
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