titleIn

Titlein is a term used in information management to denote the original input title of a document as provided by a user or author, before any normalization or canonicalization takes place. It is commonly encountered in metadata schemas and data processing workflows, and may appear in lowercase or camelCase in code (titleIn). It is distinct from fields such as title, which stores a canonical or display-ready form, and from fields like titleOriginal in some schemas that serve a similar purpose.

In practice, titleIn preserves the exact string as entered, including punctuation, diacritics, capitalization, and extraneous whitespace. It serves for auditing, provenance tracking, and matching against user queries. After ingestion, pipelines may derive a normalized title from titleIn to populate title and other derived fields.

Implementation considerations include data type (string), encoding (usually UTF-8), localization, and privacy. Because titleIn can reflect user input, it may require validation rules, length limits, and sanitization to prevent issues in some systems. Some schemas treat titleIn as transient data that is converted and then discarded; others retain it as part of historical records for completeness or reconciliation.

Examples of use include digital library metadata pipelines, content management systems, and bibliographic databases where both the original input and a normalized representation are useful for search, display, and reconciliation. In such contexts, titleIn provides an auditable snapshot of how a title was entered at ingest.