Vientitulot

Vientitulot is a term in metadata theory describing a scheme for encoding multiple titles for a single work within one bibliographic record. It aims to support discovery across languages, editions, and media by preserving original and variant titles in a structured form.

Origin and status: Vientitulot is a neologism created by digital-humanities scholars in the early 2020s to address title fragmentation. It remains theoretical and is not yet standardized.

Key features: The record contains a primary title plus a list of variants, each with language and script tags, edition or format identifiers, and optional authority references. Variants may include translations and region-specific titles.

Example: A novel first titled Le Soleil, later published in English as The Sun and in Japanese as Taiyō. A vientitulot record would mark Le Soleil as primary and include The Sun and Taiyō as language-tagged variants.

Advantages and challenges: The approach improves cross-language and cross-edition discovery but adds data-model complexity, governance needs, and interoperability considerations. Effective use requires clear policies for validating and maintaining variants.

Relation to existing practice: Vientitulot relates to title-variant concepts and can be used with MARC 240/245 or linked-data vocabularies. It is a complementary model to current standards rather than a replacement.