Another aspect of international databases

[shrdlu01]

[source] (https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names) [en]

As a librarian I champion indexing over cataloguing. An item can gave multiple valid index entries
but only one catalogue entry. As a database designer I insist that the right place to put data is where the user first looks for it. That raises issues when the user expects a different collating sequence.

I arrived at the sign-in desk for the 1990 World Science Fiction Convention in "den Haag" (or "The Hague") in "The Netherlands" (or "Holland" or "Nederlands".) I found a small group of confused Americans. They were searching a printed list to find their details, without success. Having dealt with this at work the week before I collected undeserved kudos by pointing out that in The Netherlands the prefix "van" in a surname is not part of the collating sequence so "van Damme" is filed under D and not V. The fact that the number of names in the report is more than the entries in the database is a lesser error than only including either.