Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I want to maintain high-quality metadata in my Calibre library, and the only way to do that is to enter it myself.
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Agreed. I perceive the downloaded tags more as a list of suggested alternate keywords which I take under advisement, decide what seems to be applicable/relevant and keep those tags, removing all of the rest.
I've seen keywords/tags like the following list (based on
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant):
- Fiction
- Fiction: Modern
- Fiction: Modern - 1980
- Fiction: 80's
- Fiction: 1980
- Fiction: Contemporary
- Fiction: Contemporary - 1980
- Fiction: Fantasy
- Fiction: Fantasy - Modern
- Fiction: Fantasy - Modern - 1980
- Fiction: Fantasy - Contemporary
- Fiction: Fantasy - Contemporary - 1980
- Fiction: Alternate World
- Fiction: Alternate World - The Land
- Fiction: Fantasy - Alternate World
- Fiction: Fantasy - The Land
- Fiction: <List of racial archetypes>
- Fiction: Fantasy - <List of racial archetypes>
- Fiction: Fantasy - Psychological [devolving after this into multiple psych terms]
- [And the list just continues to go on and on...]
I've seen many situations similar to this. Each book having highly repetitive tags with multiple variations of terms; reminds me of mathematical permutations and
not a keyword search.
The thing to keep in mind is these are not knowledge databases, but
sales databases. The website's intent is to sell you a product and to do that they provide information to gain your interest based on the widest possible similarity to any search term(s) requested.
So, for that series, I might have the following tags: Fiction, Fantasy, 1980's, Alternate World, The Land, <prominent character names, all sides of dispute>, <racial archetypes>. Probably a couple of psych related keywords depending on what resonates with my perception of the book: for Donaldson, "angst" is pretty much mandatory. This list is a far cry from the original set of downloaded tags.
Note: To quote Rocky Horror Picture Show, "Time is fleeting". The use of terms to convey time as a keyword/tag is so subjective it's effectively useless. Current, Contemporary, Modern, Today and other such terms are only appropriate once you specify a larger time period - a decade, century or period. For instance "the 80's" could signify any century at all - including ones that didn't happen yet as time travel stories are quite popular.