How to do queries?

I am not a new member but have not seen a section for instructions of performing queries. A simple example of what I mean by query is: how do I find out how many fiction titles and how many non-fiction titles have I read in any given year? How many biographies have I added, or read in a given year? How to perform queries with just 1 or multiple filters.

Thanks,

Brenda

Most of this depends on how you have entered your books. If you have tagged your books fiction or nonfiction and entered dates read, you can use 'search your library' and sort to find this out.

You have 245 books in your biography collection, seven of them read this year.

There are basic stats accessible from your Home or Profile page (“stats/memes”) which will get you some way, but you’ve probably seen those already.

There’s a summary of the syntax of “your books” search here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/%22Your_books%22_Search

It’s easiest to use if you open up the “Advanced search” panel from the drop-down. It doesn’t allow you to filter by any date other than publication date, unfortunately. You could get around this by adding tags or creating collections for “read in 2020”, etc., but I find the easiest thing is to export my catalogue as a csv file every three months or so, open it up in a spreadsheet tool and do my own breakdowns by date, category, language or whatever. That way you can produce month by month charts showing pretty much any combination of data you are interested in (language, format, number of pages, how long they have been on your shelves, ...)