As a South Asian language student in the physical card catalogue era, I was used to going to alternative banks of cards intended for books in "my" alphabets. We were encouraged to do this from the beginning so we didn't depend on transliteration. It seemed to me that the alternative title field in the library should/could fill two needs:
- Carry the original name of a book in translation - so I'd know the title of my English theology book in the original German
- Carry the title in the original script of non-Roman alphabet language.
However, I ran into two problems:
- The alternative name does not appear in the information panel (see screen shot below)
- One cannot update the alternative name in the information panel to add original title
Net result - I haven't a clue of its intended use but please make it work for the use cases I expected.
An example illustrating the need to search for both translated and original titles of a book:
