Mac and Mc together

A convention of sorting names with the Scottish and Irish patronymic prefixes Mac and Mc together persists in library science and archival practice.

Rules once used for filing have been dropped for some newer computer systems, and the interfiling of Mac and Mc names is an example, according to a 2006 book.

This topic has a complicated and disparate history, spread over different continents and relating to different areas of indexing, cataloguing and filing.

[6] A 1938 book that is a comparative study of cataloguing in various British libraries regarded Mac + Mc + M' sorting as an example of achieved "standardisation" in alphabetisation.

3 of his The Art of Computer Programming gave a listing showing the operation of around 40 rules, of which "Mc = Mac" was one, for library card sorting.

[9] According to the ALA wiki, it maintains in print two publications on filing rules, one covering that "word-by-word" convention, and another prepared in 1980 that is "letter-by-letter".

Mc tab on a file card divider of British origin. Some traditional filing systems treated Mac/Mc names as if the prefix were a letter such as a putative "Mc" between L and M or between M and N in the alphabet.