Need help classifying history books

[ficbot]

I just got a huge dvd of history-based ebooks and I am struggling with how to categorize them. Do you do it by category---like, Canada, America, British and so on? Or do you do it by century? By 'era'? What about historical fiction, do you put it in with the non-fiction, so that you can look at (for instance) everything about the Ancient Greeks all together? What about topical things---if I have several books about the Titanic, for instance, is that European History? 20th Century History? How can I sort everything so I can find the big groups (like the stuff about Ancient Greece) without getting bogged down in a thousand tiny sub-categories?

I welcome any suggestions. The dvd, which I am reviewing for Teleread, had almost 300 books on it. I want to read and enjoy them, but the nerd in me needs to sort everything into its proper spot first

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ficbot

I just got a huge dvd of history-based ebooks and I am struggling with how to categorize them. Do you do it by category---like, Canada, America, British and so on? Or do you do it by century? By 'era'? What about historical fiction, do you put it in with the non-fiction, so that you can look at (for instance) everything about the Ancient Greeks all together? What about topical things---if I have several books about the Titanic, for instance, is that European History? 20th Century History? How can I sort everything so I can find the big groups (like the stuff about Ancient Greece) without getting bogged down in a thousand tiny sub-categories?

I welcome any suggestions. The dvd, which I am reviewing for Teleread, had almost 300 books on it. I want to read and enjoy them, but the nerd in me needs to sort everything into its proper spot first

Why not use a mix of hierarchical

History
History.Canada
History.Canada-18thC


History.Disasters

[Adoby]

Tags are nice. Then you can mix and match freely, and combine as you need. But some hierarchy is good to ensure uniform use of tags.

Type of book: Fiction/Nonfiction/Reference.
Genre elements included: Romance/Crime/Disaster/Cooking/Medicine/Religion/Astronomy/Fantasy/Biography/Travel/Unclassifiable.
Places/settings: Italy/USA/Greece/Titanic/Hell.
Time: 1800 CE. 11 BCE. Prehistoric. Iron Age. Contemporary. Near future.

It helps a lot if your reader device/app support browsing using tags...

[miquele]

Could you expand a bit on that please, Adobe or theducks?
I'm faced with an excessive list of tags by now, but I'm not really sure how I could use hierarchies in Calibre.

[Adoby]

If the books have bad metadata, in the form of unusable tags, then that has to be fixed. Perhaps by copying them to an extra field "oldtags" and then deleting the tags, and add new.

Just add tags that are descriptive and that help you classify and find books. Calibre then let you set up searches for different combinations of tags. You can create a lot of virtual libraries for many different combinations. For instance fiction+crime+Rome but not juvenile. Or non-fiction+archeology+Greece. Or Reference+maps. And so on.

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/virt...tual-libraries

But the hierarchy system may also be used. You should decide what type of tags to use at what level. For instance fiction/non-fiction/reference/periodical as the first level. Then followed by genre. After that location. Or perhaps location before genre? And so on. Maybe you could use some formal classification scheme, like one used in libraries?

Here is one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ecimal_classes

You can assign books to more than one position in a hierarchy. For instance a fictional book about an archeological expedition, with flashbacks to events at the time that left the traces that the archeological expedition is examining. It would be both contemporary and historical.

Read more about the hierarchy feature in the fine manual and experiment until you find some usable system.

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/sub_groups.html

It is difficult to save books to a meaningful tree structure using tags or hierarchical classifications. It is best to keep the books in calibre and use that, or use a ebook reader that supports the tags calibre use. But it is not impossible to create a tree structure where the same book can be present at several places. One way is to allow duplicates, another to use different types of symbolic or hard links at the operating system level. But this is something that calibre doesn't support. You would have to fix that yourself.

Personally I mainly use loose genre classifications, and try to make them detailed enough so any classification is around 20-200 books. If there are too many books in one genre classification I divide it by making it more specific. A work in progress... Slow progress. :X

Fiction.Crime.Historical.Rome can be one such classification. I have a lot of historical crime novels...
Non-fiction.Archeology another. I don't have many books about archeology. If I obtain more I might have to be more specific.

[miquele]

Cheers, Adoby. I was particularly interested in the hierarchy bit - the link here http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/sub_groups.html looks promising to start with.

[LadyKate]

Have you checked out this site?
http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-0-136...r-subjects.php
It has category standards for almost anything. A bit detailed for my taste but very suited to something like history.

[speakingtohe]

I use Hierarchal but keep it to one sublevel. Going to many levels resulted for me in duplicates.
For example I might have History.18th century.Quebec. Canada and History.Canada.Quebec.18th century.
No harm done but it irritated me and made data entry and sorting more cumbersome.
For you History is probably redundant as they are all history.

I would start with top category as time or country followed by the other. Then I would put single tags in the same field or another, designating culture, specific area, and things like political, military etc. At some point you will be done, or so I keep telling myself, and it will be easy to sort groups and assign a secondary hierarchal group if it seems desirable.

Helen