A question about tags

Hello, it's MrsLee here at my church working on our new library account!

I am working on the tags and I wonder if there would be a benefit to putting an a before every author's name and an s before all the subjects? It seems to me that that would help organize the tags for easier searching, but I wonder if I'm over-thinking it. Any suggestions?

By the way, I'm no longer keeping a card catalog. No one ever used it except for me, and it's much easier to look things up here. Now I have to learn how to export my book info though. I'm not there yet.

Since there's a field for author's name, I don't put the author's name in the tag category. Also, I was ending up with so many subjects, I started listing only the tags that are used as categories to shelve the books. In the review section, I write a couple of sentences about the book, or sometimes type in the entire table of contents. The review can be searched, and therefore there can be an endless number of subjects that show up that way. For example, I have a book categorized as "A" (Quaker history). When looking at the table of contents and leafing through it to figure out what kind of summary I wanted to use in the "review" field, I noticed a very interesting paragraph about racism at the beginning of a chapter. I mentioned this in the "review" field. I don't have a tag for "racism," but if it appears in a book title or in a review, anyone can search for "racism" in "all fields" and get a list of books that contain information on racism.

Thanks for responding WARM. I haven't been using the 'a' or 's' before author and subject, but I have been tagging with the author's name and the subjects, as well as the names of the series and the catalog number. Since I'm trying to achieve the equivalent of the card catalog in my tags, that's what I chose to do for now. My ultimate goal is to make it easy for readers to search the library for the subjects they wish to read about. I'm going to have to push LT to make that happen though. So far there isn't much interest.

MrsLee

I decided to join the group, after reading your 'rut' thread.

For tags, the, one of their biggest benefits is in social networking. So, having really odd tags doesn't help on the networking side. I have done my share of unusual tagging, but I try to have 4-5 tags for each book that point to what it is about. I sometimes will put in almost synonymous words as different tags. In a library where you haven't read every book, this is not difficult for non-fiction books.

vpfluke - Glad you joined us! :) I haven't used tags for the social aspect much yet. As a teacher and librarian, I guess I look at them more for subject matter teachers, parents and pastors might be interested in. I find though, as I go along, three or four per book is usually enough.

Another purpose for my tags is to help me remember what the book is about. With some 5,000 books listed in LT, I don't remember everything. In addition, I am not up to reviewing every book in my listing (I have about 50 reviews), so tags are simpler to do.

Is there anywhere on LT that I can find a list of common tags for churches or religious libraries? We would like to keep a fairly narrow list of tags (say, 25-50 to start with), and avoid overlapping tags at our small Quaker library.

I don't think there is a list of common tags for church libraries. For instance, your profile page does not clue you in quickly to your being a religious library.

However, you could look on the right side of your profile page at the list of libraries similar to yours. I looked at the first four on your profile page, and see that they are all Quaker libraries. All but newtownfriends are tagging. So, you might look at their tags (and others down the list) and come up with a list that could reflect how other Quakers have tagged, and see if you like them.

I'm not sure why you would tag with the author's name. A search of the author's name will pull up an item as it is, so why is an extra tag needed? Wondering if I"m missing something because we don't use the tag field much...

#9

I see tags as providing a cloud of information about a book. So I frequently tag the author, also the chief character if it is fiction. For the uncommon books that share the same title, it is perhaps useful if you are looking at tags to see the relevant author -- some of this depends as to whether you are in a "looking up mode" or in a "browsing mode."