Book classification system

[thehawkman]

I have a lot of books in various formats. Even though I can rename them using calibre and its ability to get information for them, that's only half the battle. I am looking for a system that would allow me to classify them. On a previous hard drive which crashed I used a folder hierarchy of the US Library of Congress I got from Wikipedia, with folders for each of its categories (A - Z) and with other folders below those for the subcategories, and so on, because that is what the publishers themselves use, so for example a book about banking would go under H - Social sciences - H*** Banking. Combined with the windows native search in windows vista and later, I could very easily find almost any book. The only problem was that in the structure in question, some categories were missing, and in some cases the books themselves did not have the LOC information printed inside, and the updates to the LOC classification were not free. Also it had an insanely large number of categories, which is the same problem I am having with the Dewey Decimal System: It has 10 major categories and a total of about 900 subcategories. That makes it hard to manage. The system I am looking for would have a smaller number of categories (somewhere like 20) so I don't have too spend time wondering "would this go under banking or finance?"/ "would this go under sports or fitness?", and also some of the major categories did not seem too intuitive ("Banking" under "H - Social Sciences"? Not exactly intuitive. Also it would be somewhat "official", just like the LOC is maintained. Anyone have such a classification system? I don't like the way calibre stores books (Seth Godin\Stop Stealing Dreams (7) for example), it doesn't use categories and I only use it for renaming using metadata downloaded from the internet and for conversion of epubs to PDF.

[DaleDe]

Read about Genre in our wiki. https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Genre

[dickloraine]

Why would you do this, if you have calibre? There you can use tags, which are superior to any folder structure. If you use folders, you have to put books under one and only one label. And if you - some time in the future - wish to change it, it will be very difficult.
You are free to use as few or as many tags as you like. So you can go for the system you have in mind, but you would also be able to make something like a subject catalog.
You could also use custom columns, so you use one column for something like the Dewey System and another one for more private tags and another one for subjects.
Folders are very simplistic. Calibre is more of a database, with the added comfort to be tailored to books.
And if you need it on devices where calibre doesn't work, you can make catalogues.

[samhy]

As you said, Calibre is good for storing. If you use tags, the way your library will be displayed will allow you to sort your books. That's very convenient

[thehawkman]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

Why would you do this, if you have calibre? There you can use tags, which are superior to any folder structure. If you use folders, you have to put books under one and only one label. And if you - some time in the future - wish to change it, it will be very difficult.
You are free to use as few or as many tags as you like. So you can go for the system you have in mind, but you would also be able to make something like a subject catalog.
You could also use custom columns, so you use one column for something like the Dewey System and another one for more private tags and another one for subjects.
Folders are very simplistic. Calibre is more of a database, with the added comfort to be tailored to books.
And if you need it on devices where calibre doesn't work, you can make catalogues.

Actually tags suck. Gmail makes a similar claim, and a lot of people dislike it for that very reason. And I am not interested in a custom database. A folder hierarchy is much better. Why enter tags for files, when I can rename them using Calibre and its metadata downloader and then drag and drop using Windows Explorer to one of the already predefined foldesr for the appropriate category.
I name my books “author-title” and then put each of them in a folder with the same name. I can do this using calibre with a “save to disk” template, after I’ve downloaded the metadata. This allows me to know how much space each book and my library takes on the hard drive, and besides, by storing each of it in a separate folder, I can store other things like videos or code samples with the book. I can’t do that within Calibre.

http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-0-136...09-edition.php

I will use this. Found it using that Wiki page. Thank you. 50 Top categories is very manageable, it takes the indecision out of sorting and it is updated periodically, so it is just perfect.

[dickloraine]

Okay, do it how you like, everybody has his own preferences But to just claim, that folders are better, without any argument, is a little bit strange. You can do anything with tags, that you can do with folders. And you can do more. So I don't know, how they "suck". And I don't know, how I would find anything in the university library, if there were no subject catalogues (which are essentialy tags).

[donald1x]

Wow, Tag(Keyword) vs Folder (Category).

That's an entire battlefield in and of itself.

I used to be quite anal in putting my files in folders by category, and subcategory. I drove my team insane when I designed our office's cloud-based shared document system.

Then, personal desktop search engine comes along, and hey, this tag stuff is so much more convenient.

The issue with single hierarchy folder based category is that: it is a SINGLE hierarchy of classifications, whereas a book can be: Science Fiction, SciFi Fantasy, Cyberpunk, with Romance, Comedy, about Sherlock Holmes, in Pern Series...

(or in the office: Research article / News about Internet, Commerce, Social Network, impact on Third World, Education, by BCG, for Project XYZ)

With a single hierarchy, you must make sure how you classify when you file and the way you think when you want to retrieve is the same way. and often enough, that's not true.

Tag (and an adequate search engine like what Calibre has) makes filing simple, and retrieval quite easy, BUT, inconclusive. (as you can never tell if the document doesn't exist, or if you just tag it wrong...)

So, I recommend, use TAG at least. and put in a nice folder hierachy if you have time.

but thats just me