Somehow I had a feeling this week's Tuesday Thingers question would be about tags. Marie, at Boston Bibliophile asks:. . . do you tag? How do you tag? How do you feel about tagging- do you think it would be better to have standardized tags, like libraries have standardized subject headings, or do you like the individualized nature of tagging? What are your top 5 tags and what do they say about your collection or your reading habits?
I do tag my books as I enter them – or try to remember to tag them. I like the idea of being able to sort things by general categories. I wasn't really consistent about tagging when I first joined LT, but lately I've tried to mend my ways and become more regular.
At the moment, LT isn't allowing me to see all my tags ("rampaging elephant. . ." – don't you love their error messages?), but my most frequent seem to be fiction, American literature, British literature, Library of America, literary criticism, and Medieval literature. I tag mostly by genre, and I tend to use pretty broad, general categories; although I have a few more specific ones (for instance, anything having to do with Lewis Carroll's Alice books gets tagged "Alice").
I wouldn't be opposed to having regularized headings for the books, so long as I could add my own individual tags as well. I suppose regularized headings or tags would give everyone the advantage of being able to compare library lists a little more easily, but I do prefer the freedom of being able to come up with my own categories.
I'm still in that inconsistent phase I think. :-) I do tag books as they come in now and as I read them, but generally I stick to whether or not it's a TBR book and the type of book it is. I need to settle on the categories though and not keep changing it up.
ReplyDeleteI also tag as I enter books. I notice there are three books in my library I haven't tagged yet... hmmm.
ReplyDeletei seem to enter more and more tags as time goes by- my average per book is like 2.5 or something, whereas when i started with lt it was usually just one per book. some of my books have five or six tags!
ReplyDeleteI do think it would be cool to have the option. That's the best idea I've read so far.
ReplyDeleteI tagged right from the beginning but I was used to doing it through tags on different blog sites I used.
ReplyDeleteEverything I can think of gets a tag so along with science-fiction, there's Not yet read, paperback, anthropomorphism and html. I have this fear of not being able to find a particular book I guess.
I'm going to check out your Medieval Literature tag. That's something I've just not gotten into yet.
ReplyDelete