A customer sent in this useful code to shorten Joomla headers. It removes the site description from the meta title and adds a ZOOMTITLE tag in the <head> section of the HTML code for Zoom to find..
<?php $mydoc =& JFactory::getDocument();$mytitle = $mydoc->getTitle();echo '<meta name="ZOOMTITLE" content="',str_replace("TEXT TO REMOVE FROM TITLE GOES HERE","",$mytitle),'">'; ?>