We sometimes have problems with our users being able to find titles beginning with leading articles. If a title has been entered without the leading article (e.g. Reign of Charles V), a patron who searches for "The reign of Charles V" will not be able to find the title. Our title field is set up as follows:
Term indexed
Word indexed

Use stop word list

Under type and indexing: word by word; ignore leading article


Thus, if DB/Text can ignore the leading articles when searching (e.g. title entered with leading article, but patron can search without leading article "the" and still pull up the title), why can a patron not search with the leading article and not pull it up when it doesn't have the leading article entered in the textbase? Am I missing something obvious here?

Thank you for your help.

It looks like your users are doing phrase searches. Phrase searches use the Word index, and the entire phrase must appear in the record. Leading articles are ignored only in the Term index. If your users searched for:

=The reign of Charles V

They would be using the Term index, and the leading article would be ignored.

I've entered a wishlist item to have an option to ignore the first article in a phrase search. You are the first I know of to ask for this feature.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Lisa,