I'm somewhat worried by the informal use of the term "alphabetical order" in this thread. In the pure-UTF-8 world of RDF, there exists a thing called the 'Unicode Collation Algorithm' http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/ and it's much, much, much more complex than things usually implied by the term "alphabetical order." There are very good reasons for this complexity (outlined in document above); if there's anyone who thinks that some of those reasons don't apply to BIBFRAME, I'd love to hear them. cheers stuart