As the co-listowner that Douglas mentionned who regularly makes a printout of the subscription list arranged by name I want to support his statement that characters like "" "", < > around a subscriber's name really do play hob with the sorting. Eric said that Listserv automatically places " " around names that contain some special characters, such as the period. Well, I am looking at my names printout and there are a number with the " " that do not contain any special characters that I can see, .e.g. "Beth Fellendorf" "Michelle Chan" "Ufu Library" "Canterbury Newsgate" "Thousand Oaks Library" And what is the explanation for the names with the angle brackets: <GPO Cataloging Branch I> <Buffalo & Erie Co. Pub. Lib.> Why isn't this one in quotation marks, with all its special characters? Yours in puzzlement, Judith Hopkins, Listowner of Autocat [log in to unmask] On Sat, 9 Nov 1996, Winship wrote: > On Fri, 8 Nov 1996, W Schipper wrote: > > administrator. One problem we come across regularly is the differing > > formats for the "From:" line. Of course the tag itself is standard, > > but the format of what follows is not. For example, I've seen the > > following (I'll use my own name and address as an example): > > > > From: William Schipper <[log in to unmask]> > > From: "William Schipper" <[log in to unmask]> > > From: (William Schipper) <[log in to unmask]> > > From: Schipper, William <[log in to unmask]> > > From: William [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> > > LISTSERV will take the "name" in whatever format the subcriber gives, > and that is the "name" listserv uses. As to correcting the "name" > for distribution, Eric knows best about that. However, things like > Winship, Douglas > <Douglas Winship> > (Douglas winship) > Douglas Winship [log in to unmask] > etc. > > really screw up the list as far as sorting by name goes. I rarely > do that but a co-owner does regularly, so when a new sub comes in > with the wrong format I just change it to one which will sort properly. > > Douglas > Douglas Winship Hays County, Texas [log in to unmask] > Secondary AUTOCAT Listowner > MEDLAB-L >