titleOriginal

titleOriginal is a metadata field used in information systems to record the original title of a work, typically in its primary language or first published form. It functions as a provenance-preserving label that complements display or translated titles in catalogs, libraries, and digital asset management systems. While not a universally standardized element, it appears in many custom or domain-specific schemas that manage multilingual or archival metadata.

Usage and scope: It is often populated for works with translations, adaptations, or variant titles, to ensure the original title remains accessible for search, citation, and archival integrity. It may be stored alongside fields such as title and titleTranslated or titleLocalized. In practice, titleOriginal helps preserve original language information even as the work is presented in other languages or markets.

Examples: In literature, a novel originally published in Spanish might have titleOriginal "Cien años de soledad" and titleEnglish "One Hundred Years of Solitude." In film catalogs, original title might be "La vita è bella" with an English title "Life Is Beautiful."

Technical considerations: It should support Unicode characters to handle diacritics and non-Latin scripts. Language tags (for example, es or it) may accompany the field to clarify the original language. Normalization and transliteration policies may affect comparisons and search behavior.

Relationship to other fields: Related fields include title, titleTranslated, and titleAlt, with terminology varying by schema. TitleOriginal serves to preserve the original form of a work’s title for accuracy and historical integrity.