Help me steal your library.......'s tag system.

[haertig]

I wish I could come up with an easy to maintain categorization. I have about 20 categories I use. Standards like SciFi, Fantasy, Crime/Mystery, Action/Adventure, etc. I assign one category per book. Sometimes it is hard to pick this single category.

I often find that Action/Adventure overlaps with Thriller/Suspense. And then Crime/Mystery overlaps with Thriller/Suspense. Future Dystopia competes with Post-Apocalypse. And then, I have the category of Classics. Things like Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer go in there. But they could go into Action/Adventure just as easily if they were lesser well-known titles. I have a few categories that I don't even know what they are. Example: Steampunk. I bought a few books in this genre because I wanted to give it a try. I haven't read any of them yet. How do I decide if a book goes into Steampunk? Well, if it has a picture on the cover of someone wearing goggles, standing next to a boiler, on a blimp - it must be steampunk, whatever that is.

Basically, my categorizations, while well intentioned, are pretty useless for the most part.

[theducks]

IMHO there is nothing wrong with UP TO 3 tags.
Calibe search can find 'Action' in any usage so I tag:

Science Fiction
Action

not Science Fiction - Action

Does any Public Library still use a old school Card Catalog exclusively?

[Blakestr]

Originally Posted by DuskyRose

Mine has just over 300 tags. My rule is that each book gets one tag, and that's based on what the main genre is. I know, there's a ton of books that straddle the fence, but I go with that the genre the book mostly fits. Then I break that subject down, into groups that I'm interested in. For Scifi, my tag list looks like...

Scifi (which holds the general group that isn't any of the below.)
Scifi.AI
Scifi.Anth
Scifi.Apocalyptic
Scifi.Cyberpunk
Scifi.Dystopian
Scifi.Fant (For those Scifi that include magic)
Scifi.FirstCon (First Contact)
Scifi.Hard
Scifi.Horror
Scifi.LitRPG (where the gamers get trapped in their gaming worlds)
Scifi.Military
Scifi.SpaceOpera
Scifi.Tech (future stories, that deal with technical advancement, not so much space stuff)
Scifi.Thrill
Scifi.Time (Time travel)
Scifi.West (Firefly-like stories, loveable rogue outlaws with a Western vibe)
Scifi.Zombie

and each of those tags can be broken down into .Anth and/or .MM.
(Anthology and/ or lesbian or gay stories (as in fanfic's label of M/M)

I save all my books to the hard drive, in those files in epub format, and never touch anything in the Calibre library files. This way, if I want to sideload a bunch of books with a certain tag, they're already sorted by what I'm in the mood for.

The mysteries have even more sub-tags attached.

This seems most like the type of system I am looking for. Would you be willing to post your tags in a zip file?

[haertig]

How do y'all determine what tags to put on your books before you read them? I can handle sticking on the more general tags, like SciFi vs. Thriller, before reading a book. But looking at, for example, the tags posted by DuskyRose - some of those seem like they'd be difficult to apply before reading a book.

Personally, I don't have much use for tags after I've already read the book. I'm probably not going to read it again (sometimes I do). I use tags to assist me in determining the next book I may want to read. It almost seems like a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" scenario. In order to apply tags accurately you pretty much have to have read the book first. But if you want to use the tags to determine which book you want to read next ... ?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by haertig

How do y'all determine what tags to put on your books before you read them? I can handle sticking on the more general tags, like SciFi vs. Thriller, before reading a book. But looking at, for example, the tags posted by DuskyRose - some of those seem like they'd be difficult to apply before reading a book.

You could try using the tags that come with most metadata downloads. Though after buying 4 books from 3 vendors that added over 230 tags, I turned off tags as part of the metadata download. One of the books showed up with science fiction, fantasy, mystery and romance as the first 4 tags and then deteriorated into another 62 tags which included the authors from the "perfect for lovers of blah blah blah" listing.

[DuskyRose]

Originally Posted by Blakestr

This seems most like the type of system I am looking for. Would you be willing to post your tags in a zip file?

I'm not sure how, in what format, and all that. My tags are created to fit the books I read, so you might not use most of them.

You would be better off deciding what tags you'd use most often.

For example I have an UrbFant (Urban Fantasy) tag with a UrbFant.Academy subgroup, which separates the "Dresden Files" type of UF from the "Magicians" or "Harry Potter" type of UF. One for stories more about adults, and the other from teenagers. Just because sometimes I'm more in the mood for other or the other, where other people probably don't care.

And the Scifi.Zombie tag. I'm not a huge fan of the genre, but do pick some up once in a while if they look like they may be something I'd like.

If you want to do them in batches, you can do it in bulk in Calibre using the tag browser. You just have to decide which ones you want to use and rename the group.

As to how to decide what tag a book gets before reading, that's up to you. I grab a ton of freebies, but I have an idea of what the books are about before I get them. Cozy mysteries usually will say that's what they are, you can read the summary, or go down the page at Amazon and look under "Product Details", and you can see what genres the book is filed under at Amazon.

Since I only use one tag per book, I sometimes have to decide which it goes under if it straddles the line between two. But that's also a personal choice.

[theducks]

The only way you can 'pre-load' tags in calibre is to import a simple fake book with all tags that someone else created.

Calibre cleans up unused tag (lookup), Author, Publisher... so that book needs to stay or you risk losing a possible tag

[Quoth]

There is this:
https://bisg.org/general/custom.asp?...ACSubjectCodes

It's not hard to download the list for personal use.
Most USA online ebooks use the scheme.

[CubGeek]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Though after buying 4 books from 3 vendors that added over 230 tags, I turned off tags as part of the metadata download.

Holy crap! I don't blame you.

One of the books showed up with science fiction, fantasy, mystery and romance as the first 4 tags and then deteriorated into another 62 tags which included the authors from the "perfect for lovers of blah blah blah" listing.

I've encountered that a couple of times and eventually just turned off tags, too. Nothing so bad as the 230 tags imported, but definitely the "perfect for lovers of..." stuff. Ugh. And this was just after I'd spent a ton of time cleaning up and consolidating tags. LOL

[Cactus Chef]

Don't mean to hijack this thread, but wondering if anyone has suggestions on how to organize periodicals? I just got a bulk of magazine issues from a recent humble bundle, and the filenames are all over the place (some are month/year, some are issue number). I'm gonna have to rely on metadata to make them remotely navigable. However, AFAIK there are not many metadata scrapers for magazines, so I'm probably going to have to wing it.

I'm curious how other people do it. I'm not sure if e.g. I should use the Month/Year as the title and put the issue number as the series number, or put the issue number as the title and put the month/year as the publish date.

EDIT: Goes without saying I'm asking with Calibre in mind as my library tool.

[DNSB]

I tend to use the magazine name and the year/month (yyyymm) as title with the issue number as the series number.

I.e. Elektor - 202103 as the title, Elektor as the series name and 488 as the series number.

[maddz]

When I was cataloguing our comics issues over at LibraryThing, I used ‘Title Issue #’ and had the issue / publication date elsewhere in the entry. Having the issue date in the title made it look like there were gaps for irregular releases. I then attached each issue to a series, along with collections and other media.

[tomsem]

I've long wanted to sort my ebook collection by Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal classification, even though public libraries don't typically do this AFAICT.

I use an app called CLZ Books to catalog physical books. It can scan ISBN bar codes or look things up by title/author, then it adds a bunch of metadata that they have accumulated. This usually includes LoC and DD classifications.

I'm planning to export my calibre database into CLZ Books, then let it add metadata, then export it and see if there's some way to import this back to calibre, use it as a sort key, and possibly generate reports out of this.

There's no way to sort a book list when a book has multiple tags, and having some way to visit virtual shelves that group things as they would if they were shelved in a library seems like it would be fun and interesting.

[theducks]

I use 2 methods:

Those with simple issue number
Title: name #(leading 0 padding) Series: Name [#]

For those with Month YYYY

Title: name Month YYYY Series: Title [YYYY.MM]

Series is done that way so it sorts properly. Always use digits, for months in the series column

If they span some months (like Analog did), I simply use the first in the Series index. The title has the range

You can adapt for Week#, or even Day (again, use digits 1=Sun, 7=Sat

[Cactus Chef]

Originally Posted by theducks

I use 2 methods:

Those with simple issue number
Title: name #(leading 0 padding) Series: Name [#]

For those with Month YYYY

Title: name Month YYYY Series: Title [YYYY.MM]

Series is done that way so it sorts properly. Always use digits, for months in the series column

If they span some months (like Analog did), I simply use the first in the Series index. The title has the range

You can adapt for Week#, or even Day (again, use digits 1=Sun, 7=Sat

Thanks. The frustrating thing is the periodical in question looks like it changed its own system at some point (i.e. it started off as "Issue Month Year") and then switched to Issue Number after like issue 200 or so.

There's an unofficial fanlist that numbers them by Volume and Series (i.e. Year 1 becomes Volume 1, Issue 4 of that year becomes Vol. 1, Number 4, etc.), but I'm finding it a pain to convert to the Series column for use in Calibre. Right now I'm having to convert it to a strictly numerical Issue Number by counting the number of issues in each volume before it (e.g. if each previous year had 12 issues, Vol 4 Issue 4 becomes Issue 40).

I don't know if there's a better way to do this. But I've only got another 20 to mark up, so even if I figure out a "perfect" solution, redoing them might not be worth the effort.