Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Tuesday Thingers: Playing Tag

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.

6 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. I also tag as I enter books. I notice there are three books in my library I haven't tagged yet... hmmm.

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  3. i 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!

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  4. I do think it would be cool to have the option. That's the best idea I've read so far.

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  5. I tagged right from the beginning but I was used to doing it through tags on different blog sites I used.

    Everything 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.

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  6. I'm going to check out your Medieval Literature tag. That's something I've just not gotten into yet.

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