[Gary_M_Mugford]

DaltonST,

I've had a situation that looks a lot like yours. I have my OWN tag field which is perpetually only one word. Sometimes I have to invent words, like MThriller for Medical Thriller or BSports which stands for a Sports Biography. But in general, I keep to the categories I would mentally assign the book.

On inhaling a bunch of books, I select them all and then press E to edit and change the TagsGM category to UNCAT (Uncatagorized). At the end of the month, when I'm sending out a list of what's new to the various family members, I run my series of searches that would lead me to reducing the books to the one-word classification system that appeals to me.

First, I run my search for malformed books and author information. Here's my ___KILL_EM_ALL search string:

title:"(" or title:"[" or title:"{" or title:"-" or title:":" or title:"#" or title:"Part " or title:"Series" or title:"\.doc" or title:"\.doc" or title:"\.indd" or title:"Microsoft" or title:"\:\ Book" or authors:"The\ " or title:"\-\-" or authors:"Editor" or authors:"=Owner" or title:"ebok" or title:"publish" or author:"publish" or author:"book" or author:"design" or author:"hot tree editing" or author:"warcraft"

I manually edit the obvious ones, wiping out MOST title clauses that start with any bracket and then correcting what I can from looking at the meta-data (or pre-existing cover)

After that, I run through each of the actual category search in the order that I find optimal [which changes more than it should] and then select all (of the found books) and then press e to edit. I delete all previous contents of TagsGM and then add back in the one that the search was designed to ferret out. Press save and all the books disappear since they are no longer UNCAT. And example of a search to fulfill WRITING as a tagsGM would be:

#tagsgm:"=Uncat" and (tags:"Writing" or tags:"Words" or tags:"Language" or tags:"Grammar" or tags:"Linguistics")

THRILLER would be:

#tagsgm:"=Uncat" and (tags:"Thriller" or tags:"Suspense" or tags:"=Romantic Suspense" or tags:"=Action" or tags:"Adventure")

In developing these searches, I actually created them all in a notepad file, as the process for typing there was easier than into the editor screen in calibre. It also serves as documentation.

My only issue, is that it takes about a half-hour to KillEmAll and then do each individual search and edit in the proper tagsGM classification. Really not that long, but an automated process would be better. Afterall, It IS a repetetive chore with no editorial guidance involved beyond spotting certain incongruities, such as when a sports biography is going to be misclassified.

I'm going to take a long look at your work. It READS like it is a variant of my approach and can be melded on my approach.

Regardless, thanks for taking the time to do what you've done and to share it with us. It's much appreciated.

GM