Patron list sort order

• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 17.01

Description:
We have a situation where two patrons with hyphenated last names are sorting differently in the patron list when sorted by name. The patrons are Johnson-One, Mary, and Johnson-Two, Cindy. The patron names look like they are entered similarly, but they are not sorting the same way. Johnson-One sorts in with the Johnson, O... names, but Johnson-Two sorts at the end of all the Johnsons. And Johnson-Two cannot be retrieved by searching "Johnson-Two", but Johnson-One can be retrieved by searching "Johnson-One". What is determining the different sort routines? And why did these two patrons, who I believe were both manually entered, end up with different sorting parameters?

Resolution:
The creation of the Z303_NAME_KEY is controlled by proc 55 in your ADM or user library's tab_filing, specifically the BORROWER-NAME-KEY routine that it calls. It appears that the two patrons you cited may have been created in different versions of Aleph and may have been done with different rules. The Z303_UPDATE_DATE field in the Johnson-One record is: 20070418 while the most recent update to the Johnson-Two record was: 20050307. There are quite a few differences in the other fields of these two records that lead me to believe they were created in different Aleph versions.

If you would like to get all of the hyphenated names to sort the same way, you could run the p-manage-64 utility in the circ module. This should update all of the records according to the current rules. You may wish to review and possibly even change "the rules" before you do this. You can see how various names would be normalized by using util f/1/3 with routine 55 from tab_filing.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013