Sort alphabetically by title should include the entire title

[Kathy Lussier]

When sorting the catalog results page by title, the sorting should consider the entire title, including all subfields. In testing, we've found that subfield b, n and p are not considered when sorting by title. Since these subfields do display on the search results page, it looks the system isn't sorting correctly.

[Mike Rylander (mrylander)]

Some background: this is pure configuration, so (luckily) locally changeable. The value currently used to sort by title is generated using the "magical" MARC tag "tnf", which we create by taking the 245$a and trimming of non-filing characters ("tnf" stands for "title non-filing"). We store the "tnf" tag in metabib.real_full_record, and just pull that via a record attribute called "titlesort" with sorter=TRUE.

We could pretty easily redefine that to a MODS-based record attribute that does the equivalent. Some experimentation would be required to confirm that the subfields come out in the order we want them (lexical order, not sorted) after the transformation, but I believe they do if memory serves. The reason for a MODS transform rather than using the plain MARCXML is that MODS does the non-filing trimming for us, via the <nonSort> tag. Doing this directly via MARC or MARCXML would be much more difficult (if possible at all).

A record attribute reingest would be required after that.