Caveat Lector

In the pile of papers I’m (still!) clearing rights on and putting into the repository are some items by the computer scientist BartÅ‚omiej ÅšnieżyÅ„ski. I did my best to get his name into DSpace properly spelled, but I then ran into a problem: the author browse listed him last, after the Z’s.

This is probably Working As Designed; language-specific sort orders are a nightmare. In my case, though, ugly American that I am, I wanted him listed in the S’s. Fortunately, there’s a way to fix that in the DSpace database without having to ASCIIfy the gentleman’s display name.

The itemsbyauthor table has both an “author” column and a “sort_author” column, the latter an all-lowercase normalization of the former. A quick alteration to the latter column:

update itemsbyauthor set sort_author = 'sniezynski, bartlomiej' where sort_author = 'śnieżyński, bartłomiej';

and all is well. I’m dubious about creating a patch to do this, because in many languages and for many repositories it will be distinctly unwelcome behavior, but for those who want to be ugly Americans, here’s how.