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

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by haertig

How do y'all determine what tags to put on your books before you read them?

I use Library of Congress Classification Codes, Dewey Decimal Numbers, and Cutter Numbers. Whilst it is a lot of work to add them, once in, finding a specific item is a breeze.

If the eBook has PCIP or CIP data, i transcribe the entire block to Calibre data columns.

However, I make a lot of PDFs from articles on the web. Those I have to catalog myself. To that end, I've been studying a lot of material on library cataloging.
Even more work, but much easier to find an article, when I've forgotten the author, and title.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by Blakestr

Looking for a list of tags you use to organize your libraries - fewer is better but I have such a large range, I would love to get some recommendations about the tags you use. Have 1,000 tags was making me go crazy - but trying to condense them is also accomplishing that.

Ponder on having 6,916 major tags, each of them having their own 10,000 minor tags, and each minor tag having up to 100,000 sub tags.
Then consider that some people have all of those major tags, minor tags, and sub tags memorized.

The other option has 1,000 major tags, each having 100,000 minor tags, with up to 1,000,000 sub tags per minor tag.
Once upon a time, one could buy a series of books that listed every book ever published, with the major tag, minor tag, and sub tag for that book.
That series went out of print, at the turn of the century.

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

wondering if anyone has suggestions on how to organize periodicals?

Name of magazine, year, month. For instance:
Asimov's Science Fiction 2016 02
Nightmare 2013 01

As to the author, some literary magazines put the names of all the authors into the author section. If you want to search these authors, that's probably the way to go. I cut and paste them into the info blurb and change the author to the name of the literary magazine. I tag these as anthologies (short stories) as my family members don't care for short stories. Sometimes you have to make a choice though if you want single tags. So Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine is under Science Fiction - Anthology instead of both Scifi and Fantasy.

[theducks]

I have a custom column for pseudonym that later got also used for when Authors >3. but keeps the path short for file based devices.
The Calibre search looks at both ,

The {authors} then contains the editors or <various> (typical used for boxed sets where the compiler is not obvious on the copyright page)

[Rbneader]

1) Add your own columns! The tags are great but a single field is just too unwieldy.

I have Genre (Murder, Adventure, SciFi, etc), Tropes (Alien Cultures, Coming of Age, Time Travel, cozy mystery, detective mystery - smaller plot groupings, essentially), Relationships (Is there a romance and if so what type), and a few others depending on the specifics of the Calibre library the book is in.

2) Use the different Calibre libraries. I have Fiction, NonFiction (books) and Nonfiction (articles/papers). Calibre is a lot faster with smaller libraries, and they allow for more fine-grained control.

3) I tweak some metadata for ease of saving to folders. I buy from multiple apps and read from multiple devices away from WiFi, so I save books out to a central folder structure which gets copied onto devices. if I've got a book by a new author I set the Calibre author to "New Author", the book gets saved to the New Author folder, and if I want to try something new I can just go there. It sounds hacky, but saves time when looking for something to read. If I like it, I just update the author in Calibre when I get back to my computer.