How do you use tags?

I'm curious. How do *you* use tags? My tags are a mismatch of location markers, genre/topic markers, series markers, noting if I uploaded a cover for the book, wishlist markers... A little of everything.

I know so many people use tags in such different ways... What do you use your tags for? Do you have any tags that mean something special to you? For example, my "special memories" tag is used exclusively for books that have a very special place in my heart, books that got me out of tough times or that really made a difference to me as a reader.

Subjects for the most part. . . my versions not anybody's standard list like LOC, WorldCat and others.

The subjects sort of matched up with my shelving categories in the library, a 14 x 28 ft space I share with my wife's antique inventory, but that went the way of the wind as I ran out of shelf space and just put things where they would fit.

I use Collections for major groupings of books when I think I will want to search within them or get stats for them as a group.

Tags get used for subjects, features (signed, 1st, DJ, association copy, PB, upgrade).

I have heard of people using location leading with the @ symbol though this is less necessary now with the new field available.

James

I use them mostly for topics, so if I want to see, for example, what I've got on Norse, I click on that tag. I also use the @ tag for location for some things that I'm moving around by bulk (@ bin, @ bag, etc.), otherwise I find it hard to keep track of what I've packed or shelved.

Collections are big, overarching categories, things like To Read, Fiction, Deaccession.

Which generation of them? :)

I had been restructuring my library every time I move and never clean up all my tags fully (not easy to be done) so mine are a mix of an old attempt on subjects (that I am considering reviving), location tags (which I am cleaning up mostly so I can start doing them again with the new library), read status (with year) - probably the most stable ones) and "where from" for my Read but Unowned collection.

As I am going through all of them once I get my library in order, I am not sure what new system I will dream up...

>3 Keeline:

"I have heard of people using location leading with the @ symbol though this is less necessary now with the new field available."

Have I missed something? What new field is this?

Subjects, and a few tags for specific artists doing the front cover of the book. Although, since the improved Other Authors field, I put cover artist information there.

I don't put any kind of location information in LT since I know where my books are.

The main tag division in my collection is between fiction, non-fiction, poetry and sheet music. After that, I tag by country of origin and century (if it's pre-20th c.). After that, by topic.

For the most part, I use them for subject areas. I have also used them for authors, but not consistently.

Because I have a particular interest in bookbinding, I also use tags to indicate binding style, if it's outside the norm (tunnel books, pop-ups).

I really do need to clean up my tag list.

>6 Foretopman: The new(ish) field is Custom call number. I switched all my location tags to that field. It was a little tedious with 3000~ books, but I'm happy with the change. Now the entirety of LT doesn't get @ box15 in the tag cloud! But I do still use some location tags.

>10 PhaedraB: Ah! OK, thanks. It never occurred to me to use that field as a location, but now that I think about it, that's really all a call number is.

Most of my tags are topic/genre tags, though I have a few personal tags, but not many. I used to use tags for various challenges, but I've mostly stopped doing that. Also use tags for settings: where a book is set.

Most of my tags are about subject, genre, and series. I also tag books that need better covers, and I have a rather complicated system using a combination of tags and comments to organize the contents of anthologies. Whenever I finish a book, I tag it with the year read, just so I can easily contribute to the lists of favourites that pop up every December. I use collections to indicate ownership, format, and reading status.

A mix.

I always lead with sort order tags - non-fic, author, series, and then usually genre and format. I also have genre collections but tagging them allows better interactions eg how many fantasy books are ebooks.? I then have a few topic tags, which vary depending on my inventiveness feelings on the day. And then I have a few more useful tags, @year, use for recommendations etc.

Few books get away with less than 6 tags, and I can easily run to a dozen plus. Some of tags are unique to that book, but I try to re-use topics across multiple books if I remember. Periodically (eg far too long ago) I go through and clean up the Capitalisation, spelling/typig errors, etc.

My two biggest tags are "my own cover" and "no longer own". Most of the 'no longer own' books are older books that I read throughout my childhood. I have added over 1k book covers to LibraryThing over the years, and I always mark which books have my own cover. I also have tags for books that have no cover or bad quality covers, and every once in awhile I'll go through those and attempt finding good covers somewhere online.

I'm in the middle of completely redoing my location tags, after three years of absence from LT lots of books have been moved around. And I'm not all that organized, either, so there are some books that are simply on a table (or even the floor).

>15 Heather19: Books piled on the floor? I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.

The point of tags, for me, is that they let me access browsable lists of books at a click. So whenever I think it's useful for me to create a group of works sharing that feature, I will tag for it. That includes genres and sometimes subgenres and library-style subjects, but also other types of bibliographic data, such as whether a book is a novella or a short story collection, what century a work was published in, or whether it's a translated work. Handy for when I need a quick overview of what works I have that are, say, first contact stories, or what works deal with the 5th crusade or second language learning.

I also tag for things I personally find useful to group together: certain tropes that (for whatever reason) appeal to me (decrepit aristocracy, evil detecting dog, picaresque, uninhabited island), whether a book was turned into a movie (and whether I have seen it), whether a book about a specific city or museum was also acquired there, or whether a particular book was given to me as a present. I can also tell you exactly which books I read each year (since 2006-ish), or what books in my library I read on a plane. And then there's housekeeping tags, for entries that need a better cover, for books I have multiple copies of, and for as-of-yet unread books.

Because I can click through to LT-wide lists of those tags, my individual lists serve as convenient ways of getting recommendations (for myself as well as for others), or ideas for what to read next or what to read more of (e.g. what works to consider should I want to read more first contact stories, indulge in another picaresque novel, or learn more about second language learning). Sometimes, a list of tags for a certain book serves as memory aid of what I found particularly noteworthy or interesting about it while reading, in case I later forget what exactly it was about. That's where a lot of my singletons come from. At the same time, if I ever feel the need to read similar works, the LT-wide list will be a good place to start.

Collections I use for large(r) thematic subgroupings in my library (comics, poetry, sciences, literary criticism, mythology & religion, ya) -- much like they'd be separated out in a traditional bookshop.

Subject, but also once in a while to identify a certain publisher series a bit easier. I.e. if I put something like:
"Jujubirds SF series" in Comments, I have to search for it, i.e. type it into a search box, but if it is in Tags, I can just click on it.

Same thing if the search would give me a lot of false positive. I.e. Jules Verne Illustrated.

>16 PhaedraB: :-)

I found after many years to have amassed an unwieldy and cruft-laden collection of tags. For example, I had inconsistent tags like "non fiction", "nonfiction" and "non-fiction", which is not very helpful. There were also many cases where the information in tags was better moved to Collections, Series, or Notes, since those facilities were introduced.

So I recently removed all the tags from my books (a task that I feel was needlessly difficult), and retagged everything with a strictly limited and defined set of tags, only introducing new ones very cautiously. The best thing is using the WikiThing to document my choices. Keeps things tidy. Mine is here:

https://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/User:AleatoricConsonance

And my library is here: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/AleatoricConsonance

Definitely a "less is more" approach.

Like AleatoricConsonance, I use a relatively controlled vocabulary, mostly to document the subject(s) of a book. In my scheme, tags also go in a specific order, so that I can find information in the tag string quickly. (And I keep it all on my wiki, because my memory is not good: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/User:Casvelyn#Tagging_Method_.28and_M...

Mostly my tags tell me the genre, the years I've read a book, the nationality of the author, and the original decade of publication. I also track a few subjects of particular interest, like time travel.

>16 PhaedraB: and >19 bnielsen:. A better question might be who DOESN'T have books on the floor.

Then there is me who (or is it whom?) has boxes I bought several years ago that have the invoice stuck to the outside so I know what is there so I don't buy it again since I don't have it in LT to stop me.

I have thought about a tag for boxes but . . . on second thought . . . nope!

>17 Petroglyph: Evil detecting dog? That's my kind of tag.

I tag much the same way as Petroglyph. My tags are a mix of tropes, subjects, genres, location and format info. If we were ever able to edit the subject field half my tags would go away (especially with non-fiction). I haven't phased out my location and format tags even though I also use the new fields. That's simply a matter of me deciding how I want to go about it.

However the most fun part of tags are watching your weird idiosyncracies reveal themselves through tropes. Many of them stem from "hey, I've just read 5 books where people move or throw mountains and I'm beginning to wonder if this is a "thing" that appeals to me..." (answer: yes). The problem I have is that by the time I realize I need to create the tag, the early books that planted the seed have been forgotten and only subsequent examples are labeled.

As a "real-life" cataloguer, I know to keep my tags consistent (i.e. spelling, plural/singular), etc! Occasionally I forget which I've used, but it's pretty easy to check that.

Oh I like your system there casvelyn. Very considered. Especially your guiding philosophy; keeps it all under control.

>25 AleatoricConsonance: Thanks! We seem to have rather similar philosophies of cataloging. I've toyed with the idea of tightening up my tag list, but I like all the ones I've got at the moment.

As for the original questions, I use tags for a lot of different things.

Boring "housekeeping" stuff like read/owned status, format, and whether I've checked the data or not. Much of this is redundant with other features, either Collections or format, but I started using tags before the other features were available and like having the easy searchability and statistics they provide.

Series information.

Genre/subgenre (for fiction), subject/content for nonfiction. This is not strictly hierarchical and one book can have many such tags. This is my primary use.

Idiosyncratic, usually single-use, tags that amuse me. Some examples:

https://www.librarything.com/tag/retroactively+unfortunate+title
https://www.librarything.com/tag/sadly+there+is+a+kindle+edition
https://www.librarything.com/tag/the+only+thing+i+remember+is+the+first+line
https://www.librarything.com/tag/these+tags+contain+spoilers

>27 lorax: Idiosyncratic, usually single-use, tags that amuse me.

When I see a tag like that, my immediate reaction is to wonder if there's a book in my catalog I can apply it to. And then I do, sometimes.

I use collections for over-arching subjects, and tags for genre, generally matching the shelf set-up on my Kobo (and in Calibre). I also have my @print and @ebook tags to flag DTEs to potentially dispose of or store. I try and keep my tag lists short...

Come the New Year, when I will have time on my hands, I'll be adding Paul's books, and probably some kind of location system (although this may prove interesting when I'm keeping multiple copies...)

I don't think that I've seen this particular use of tags on this thread yet, but, in addition to using them in a lot of the ways that those upwards in the thread do, I also use some of my tags as 'character' tags. I read a lot of comics in trade paperback format (heh, that's one of my tags too. :))

Anyway. Just because a comic series is titled Superman or Batwoman or whatever doesn't always mean that he or she is the only relavent character in the TPB. So, if Wonder Woman appears in a Batwoman comic TPB then I put that in there so that I can remember (and I've also realized that I have to be specific as well, so, it'll be Wonder Woman (Diana), or in the case of Green Lanterns... oy... I think that I still have some that just say Green Lantern too... :))

My favorite thing to do with tags though is all through the year I keep a Collection 2016, or 2017 or whatever, and then at the end of the year, with Power Edit, they all turn into a tag and I can start again. It lets me still figure out how many books I read that year, but, without a lot of messy collections!

I see that a lot of people use tags to note when the book was read. The majority of my books are ones I read earlier on in my life, and I really have no clue what year... Although I do have a "read as a child" tag, but that includes anything from my very first books to like fourteen years old. And my "read in Mrs Bastin's class" tag includes 10th-12th grade, although I don't tag it as such. I guess I could always start with this year?

>31 Heather19: I think that I started putting down the exact date I finished in my excel spreadsheet about 2011 or so?? But before that I hadn't. Some I sorta know the date because the reviews in the notebook I use are mostly chronological, but, yeah, there's no harm in starting next year, or this year or whatever. I think it's a cool thing to see how my reading changes year to year.

If I read a book for school, I put the school abbreviation as a tag. It helps sometimes when I ask myself, why did I ever bother with that book? Oh, I had to.

I largely tag for subject or genre. Most are quite wide, like "medieval", a few pretty specific, like my small set of books tagged "Mahdism", about the Mahdists ("dervishes") of 19th century Sudan. For wargaming and roleplaying stuff I also tag with rules set, so all my New World of Darkness stuff is tagged "nWoD" frex.

I've got tags for:
* genre / area (e.g. fantasy, psychology)
* keeping track of books read per year (e.g. Read in 2016)
* separate 'special books' (signed, proof copy)

>34 AndreasJ:

I also tag RPGs with edition, hence GURPs 3e etc and the various Gloranthan rule sets. The background remains the same, rules conversions can be problematic (I remember the low level D&D scenario some misguided GM tried to run 100 pt GURPs 3e characters through. Never got past the first encounter.)

As others here;
fiction/nonfiction
genre (mystery, fantasy, etc.)
more specific genre (children, young adult, correspondence)
subject (animals, wwii, sea adventure)
main series character (Harry Dresden, Cadfael, Miles Vorkosigan)
place story is set in, if specific
era story is set in unless it is current
year I read the book
specific group which might care (Green Dragon, TBSL)

If I bought it as a gift for someone, I tag it "gift"

I recently removed my tags of "hardcover" and "paperback" since we have the media format now. I still have "audio" "ebook" and "DVD" or "Blueray" for quick reference and because I haven't decided yet if they are redundant.

Also removed "favorite author" since we have that on our profile, although I still have "favorite illustrator."

Tags are an evolutionary process for me. My library was added helter-skelter in the beginning, now I am slowly going through my shelves refining. I love the way we can see all of our tags at one time. Much easier to pick out when you have a redundant one, or misspelled, or forgot the comma, etc. Also so easy to remove a tag you no longer want from all the books at once!

Oh yeah, I use SantaThing and ER on those books, too.

Adding to my previous:

Prior to getting the "from where" field, I would sometimes use tags for that. I also use them to designate an ARC. And since I've been in a book club, I tag books read for the club.

I tag Early Reviewers, and I do have a few "from where" tags, but only for special occasions like traveling. I can see that there have been some new fields added to our book details in the years I was gone, but I will most likely keep using tags for those things anyways.

I have two tags (that I need to combine) for "still own?" and "still have?". Books that I'm almost positive I own, but I have no clue where they would be. I may find them during my rehaul of my locations tags, though.

In addition to many of the uses listed above, I also use tags to indicate if I've used a book (mostly non-fiction) as a research source for a particular project.

>28 paradoxosalpha: When I see a tag like that, my immediate reaction is to wonder if there's a book in my catalog I can apply it to. And then I do, sometimes.

Speaking of which, you've tempted me with "Yog-Sothothery." That's such a great tag! I'm currently using "Needs Moar Tentacles" but mine also applies to actual tentacles (squids/Krakens/octopodes) as well as Elder Things.

I use them for type of book (=when it's an eBook), overall genre (e.g. fiction, history), more specific genre (e.g. SF, Russian history, Medieval), year of purchase, place of purchase and any other relevant data, e.g. @NOT OWNED if I read it but have it no longer, where it went if so (e.g. donated to charity shop, BookMooched, vanished).

>41 macsbrains:

"Yog-sothothery" was in fact H.P. Lovecraft's own coinage for the brew of tropes and allusions that his literary executor August Derleth would attempt to systematize as the "Cthulhu Mythos."

>43 paradoxosalpha: The more you know...

My LibraryThing library is used for our church library (of which I am the librarian) and can be accessed through our church website for patrons to browse for books. Therefore, my tags are from the Dewey Decimal System and I mostly get them from the Online Library of Congress Search. Besides the subject headings, I also include the DD Call Number. This is working wonderfully because our patrons can search by author, title, subject, or call number. I LOVE LibraryThing!

>43 paradoxosalpha: >44 PhaedraB: The more you know, indeed! I won't feel bad about stealing the tag in that case :)

>45 WVBC:

Just in case it's easier for your workflow, you may want to know that Dewey Decimal number is an existing field in LT - searching it specifically requires a bit of fiddly syntax which you may or may not want your patrons to have to deal with (since if they just search for, say, '220' it will turn up everything with that string in any field), but it may make it easier for you to cut-and-paste the number into our tags.

I use tags to remember where I got books from.and what books this book set me on the path to. The first tag is a short version of this book (so I can reference it in other books) and the second is where it came from. Then I built a website which allows me to see different 'book lineages', always fascinating (it takes the data from the LT JSON API)

I can share the code but it makes a lot of assumptions for what your tags look like

Since Library Thing doesn't have a field for standard Subject Headings, I use the tags for that. I add them from what I find in OCLC or CIP.

>49 OLPH-Library: If you add from a library source you get subjects. If others have added that book from a library source you get green subjects. However they are often really horrible and it is impossible to remove garbage.

I mostly use tags for content categories - like "french" (not for books in french, but for books about the french language, like dictionaries or grammar), "france", "french history" or "french literature" (by an author from France) (*), or "forestry" and "vegetarian cuisine". But also for genres like "sciencefiction", "cookbook" and "mystery" and for document types such as "audiobook".

I don't use tags like "tbr", "present" etc. with two exceptions: "signed" for books that are signed by the author, and "santathing" for books received via SantaThing :-)

(*) This is not always easy to decide - e.g. an Indian author living in Britain, publishing in English with british publishers about Britain - is this Indian literature or British literature? So, sometimes I use more than one tag.

The iPhone app made me see the light by highlighting Collection and First Tag, so now I use a combination of Collections and Tags as shelfmarks. I shall be eradicating (slowly:-) the ugly @-tags in favor of Collection markers - no need to bother the rest of the Librarything-world with an "@ POCKET"-tag for the pocket-book shelves on our first floor when they can be marked as "Collection POCKET".
For tags I try to use the Danish Decimal Classification (DK5), an old child of the Dewey Decimal Classification.
So the "Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English" gets an "89.33" for English language. The DK5-marks for Danish and many non-Danish books are easily found in the national Danish union catalogue which is my primary source for new entries.
Fiction gets a first tag with the authors last name.
As the decimal classification is a national standard it should be usefull for the Danish Librarything community and it is easily translated to the closely related DDC and UDK (8x.xx is somewhere in language like 8xxx.xxx, 9x.xx is somewhere in history like 9xx.xxx).

What a great thread! I like seeing what everyone does over time, whether from their own needs or changes to LT.

For me, tags are a big reason why I chose LT to track both what I own and what I've read. Tags help me give a context for remembering a book, from genre (loosely) and format to themes all the way to a phrase that will trigger "omg THAT one." I've started trying to track sources of recommendations and actual books and some other things, too.

When adding tags, I also try to be mindful of stuff that other folks might want to know: locations, underrepresented characteristics of both characters and authors, names of real people mentioned, and unusual topics or themes.

>30 DanieXJ: I've been using tags for tracking when I read something, but using Collections sounds easier. Great tip!

My tags are nothing special, but just give me overview of my library by type, language, publication, subjects. Following is my standard list:

1. Type: fiction or non-fiction
2. Language: English or Hindi (two language I know), or "translation, Original Language"
3. Original Publication: 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, 21st century. Decade if published in 20th century: 1950s, 1990s etc. Year if published in 21st century: 2015, 2016
4. Form: diary, drama, memoir, poem, etc
5. Age Genre: young adults etc
6. Subjects: c++, history, drama, suspense, textbook (some 150 odd keywords). If I add new subject, I will make a small attempt to retag any existing book to which this new subject may apply.

Examples:
Artificial Intelligence by Stuart J. Russell (Author), Peter Norvig (Author): non-fiction, English, 20th century, 1990s, algorithms, artificial intelligence, computer science, programming, textbook
The Complete Fables by Aesop,, Olivia Temple, Robert K. G. Temple: fiction, translation, Greek, 6th century BC, fable, short stories, children's, young adult, ancient, animals, classics, philosophy
Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee: non-fiction, English, 21st century, 2010s, 2010, biography, narrative nonfiction, biology, history, medicine, science

I used tags to create a tag cloud that amused me.

>55 MrAndrew: Strumpet sugar

I don't know if that happened on purpose or by accident, since it is actually two tags, but it does make one wonder what would be tagged that.

Great thread that is helping me see, like karenb, what other readers are doing.

Since I've adapted to three different book sites in less than a year, learning the use of tags on this site has been helpful in narrowing down what I mean by "Tag." I tend to now use more generic tags: historical fiction, 19th century French literature, Victorian era, women's lives, dysfunctional families (there's a lot of those!), Irish potato famine. These tags represent my interest in a book's subject matter, or a book's overarching theme or setting.

The Collections that LT offers are fantastic and have kept me busy over the past 6 months. I especially like "read but unowned" as a Collection; this one I use for books I've borrowed from the library, read as part of a book group but didn't keep, or books I've decided really need a better home than mine. It helps with the decluttering of the books on the floor :}

As far as date read, I see that when I organize by that Collection on my "Your Books" page, the date is already set since when I finish a book, I add the date finished. I am also working on a thread in a group where I list book by book what I read this year. 2016 is a bit haphazard but I've figured out how I'll list the books I plan to read in 2017 in this group.

I'm really liking what I've seen on LT and the groups in which I participate. The groups have been welcoming, the multiple moderators extremely helpful, and I can't wait until I've finally updated all of my tags for my 420+ books!

As with many or most comments, my main use tags is for genre/subject; some are for series, whether loosely or tightly considered (Dune for anything from Frank or Brian Herbert, but also have Dune.Prequels, etc.). I have a number of dotted tags, Programming.SQL, Lexicon.Greek, Lexicon.Hebrew, etc.

Hope these two aren't shocking or upsetting to anyopne - haven't noticed others using them:
* Removed
* Sell.me

Our LT catalog supports a ministry of giving donated books (mostly children's books, about 5000 a year) to people in many different countries. So we have several kinds of tags:
1) From:JohnDoe - indicates donor of a book
2) To:JohnDoe - indicates recipient of a book (also, +reserve JohnDoe and +pulled JohnDoe as their request gets processed)
3) Country:Mexico - where the book is headed
4) 2016 - year the book was sent
5) _booktype - broad groupings of books, like _Board Books, _Picture Books, _Historical Fiction, etc. This is essentially a location tag.

I combine this with collections Available, No longer Available, Missing, and 2016, 2015, etc.
When I reserve a book, I attach it to collections No Longer Available and 2016, and detach it from Available.

May not be the best approach, but it pretty much works for us.
We can at the end of the year send a thank you to donors, indicating where their books have gone, report on most popular type of book, total number of books in a year, and so forth.

Here are our book types:
2011 (1224)
2012 (2650)
2013 (3705)
2014 (4088)
2015 (4995)
2016 (5588)
_Activity Books (681)
_Adult Books (2)
_Adult Classics (224)
_Adult Fiction (506)
_Adult Non-Fiction (373)
_American Girl (489)
_Art (50)
_Beatrix Potter (75)
_Beginning Readers (2170)
_Bible-Related (732)
_Biographies (731)
_Board Books (868)
_Chapter Book Series (596)
_Chapter Books (2469)
_Children's Classics (791)
_Christmas (119)
_Classics (8)
_Comics (117)
_Cultures (245)
_Dinosaurs (77)
_Drama (58)
_Education Resources (488)
_Fantasy (536)
_Geography (131)
_GoldenBooks (206)
_Hardback Picture Books (1404)
_Historical Fiction (1685)
_History (996)
_History Series (19)
_Horse Stories (202)
_Horses (60)
_In-Between Readers (1684)
_Inklings (74)
_Little House Books (251)
_Missionary Biographies (191)
_Missionary Stories (10)
_Narnia (128)
_Parenting (179)
_Picture Books (3133)
_Poetry (156)
_Science (1562)
_Sports (153)
_Transportation (167)
_Winnie-the-Pooh (133)

>59 BookEndsIntl: You might want to consider moving the from and to tags to private comments for privacy reasons.

>59 BookEndsIntl: what >60 MarthaJeanne: said

>59 BookEndsIntl: >60 MarthaJeanne: Using the Lending feature will also let you retrieve the data while keeping names private. I use that to indicate when and where I sell or give away books.

*is so happy this thread has so many awesome replies!*

So many people have so many more tags then I do. I don't generally tag for content, except very general stuff like "kid/children books". I do have a few content tags, like "quotes" or "poems", but they are rarely actually used.

If I ever go back through my entire catalogue, which I really should do for detail's sake, I'll probably add a lot more tags. I desperately need a "mystery" tag, which I thought about years ago but didn't add because most of my mysteries were Nancy Drew and already tagged Nancy Drew. But my collection has grown and that could come in handy.

>63 Heather19: If you go to the Tags page and click edit on your Nancy Drew tag, put a comma after the original tag, then add 'mystery.' Now all books with the ND tag will also be tagged mystery, too.

>64 PhaedraB: That's a pretty nice tip! Thanks.

From my bookmarking habits tags are kind of personal, they are mnemonics that enable myself to find something I once looked at at some point in the future. A research tool essentially. The subject of a written work quite often is not what I find interesting about what I am reading; the See Also or related field of a hierarchical thesaurus, a tag also though, can fulfil this function. It's probably better to not have these as public.

I use tags for subject headings (e.g. mystery, crime, poetry, biography & memoir) and also for the year I read the book. I know the year read is available elsewhere on the book info, but doing this in a tag allows easy sorting and also allows me to tag with multiple years if a book is a favorite that gets read over and over.

Just curious, how do folks handle books they start but just can't finish? tag, category, or do you not track those?

>68 bjellis: i think ive only ever not finished about 2 books, both before i started keeping track. I believe some use a dnf (did not finish) tag, or similar.

>68 bjellis:

I differentiate between books I intentionally abandon, meaning to never again pick up (these get the tag *abandoned*; the asterisks mark it as a house-keeping tag); and books that I leave unfinished for whatever reason, but that I do want to finish or think deserve another try. For the latter I use *started but unfinished*. If I do manage to finish the book at a later point, I adjust the tag to read *formerly read but unfinished*

I rarely start a book and don't finish it, mostly because I just can't stand to not find out what happens, no matter how stupid or poorly written it is. I do have a tag for "reference--never finished reading", for encyclopedias and writer's handbooks and that sort of thing.

There's a standard collection for Read But Not Owned, why not make a collection for Read But Not Finished!

I don't explicitly keep track of what I've finished or not, but for books added in the last few years, it's a good rule of thumb that if I've finished it it's got a review, and vice versa. However, a fair number of my books are reference stuff that are not really meant to be read cover to cover - these might have a review even if I've only read bits of it.

>68 bjellis: "quit reading" If I officially quit reading a book. I am not likely to pick it up again. Most likely I will also get it out of my house.

I may quit reading a book for many reasons, not necessarily because it was a bad book. Only a bad book for me.

I see that I also have an "unfinished tag." I am going to edit this to "quit reading." I remove books which I do not feel I read enough of to review or rate.

>74 MrsLee: If I have to return a library book without reading it, I remove it. If I started it and decide not to read it I don't remove it; I want a record that it is not a good book for me.

I forgot to add: i use tags for the "quit reading" function, since I think of collections as for groups of books i might place together on their own shelf or in a separate bookcase. That is true for "currently reading", but books i abandoned woul not be 'deserving' of such a treatment: I do not think of them as a meaningful group.

#68 - I have a Read but Unfinished collection (and a Read but Unowned one).

>68 bjellis:

I very rarely do not finish books (less than 1 per 5 years or so) so I do not have a special collection for them. Due to the way my library is structured, they end up in "Read but Unowned" with a tag "abandoned" instead of read (plus a year based tag as the read ones get.

However - these are books I never plan to finish - if I am planning to give them another chance they either go back to their original collection as if I never started them or get deleted if they were from the library.

Apparently I *do* have a "never finished reading" tag, that I completely forgot about. There are a couple Early Reviewer books that I just couldn't get through (but I reviewed them), as well as a library book I was less then impressed with and a childhood read that creeped me out too much to finish.

nitpicking, but... "read but unfinished" just doesn't sound right to me. If i say that i've "read" a book, i mean that i've read the whole thing. A simple "unfinished" (or "never finished reading" etc) seems more accurate. I generally put unfinished books in my "abandoned" collection in order to quarantine them from the rest of my library, plus tag them with the relevant year.

I find that over the past few years I have gotten a lot more willing to let myself abandon books that I'm not enjoying. I have too many books in my To be Read collection that I really want to get to.

I've lived most of my life in non-English-speaking countries so that English language books were precious, but it has gotten a lot easier to get hold of books now, and my time is now precious to me as well. (I've also gotten a lot better at reading German.)

I keep my tags pretty simple, but they allow me to browse through my library to my heart's content :)
The tags I mainly use are for genres and subgenres (e.g. science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, space opera, dragons).
My collections represent the status of my books (read/to read).
The few exceptions I have on this "rule" are because they are significant enough to me for my browsing but I don't want to put those books in a separate collection.
The exceptions are:
- medium (e.g. ebook, audiobook)
- format (e.g. graphic novel, manga)
- the tag "on loan" so I don't have to wonder why I can't find the book :p

>79 Heather19: >80 MrAndrew:

My Other Reader and I use the phrase "read in" for books that we've read, but not read all the way through. Many (most?) books other than novels do not demand to be read through in order to fulfill their design. I don't have a "read in" tag or collection, though. (Logically speaking, "Never finished reading" should include "Never started reading"!)

I don't really use LT as a reading tracker, but I do use the "Currently Reading" and "Read but Unowned" collections. In general, a book in my catalog is read if I've reviewed it (and vice versa). If I break off in the middle of something, I usually make a remark in the comments field for my own later reorientation.

This year I did something different with tags so I could get a screen shot of the covers for a blog post. I have Best NF 2016, Best Crime Fiction 2016 and Best LitFic 2016. Not sure if I'll keep it up, but it worked for my machinations.

Further to what has already been written on personal preferences for subject tags, I distinguish between e.g. "Germany" vs "Deutsch", "Sweden" vs "Svenska", or "Italy" vs "Italiano", for anything related to the country, vs the language the book is actually written in. The subject e.g. "Estonia" will typically be one of the first tags, whereas the primary language of the book e.g. "Eesti" will always be the last tag.

The country tag is often not relevant to a book and so may not be required, however every book is written in some language and so correspondingly tagged, and most of mine are in "English". I haven't made a sub-distinction between "English (US)" or "English (UK)", as that is not important in my collection; if my collection had a stronger linguistic emphasis that would be something to consider, as well as any written with a heavy content of minority languages and dialects - that would introduce a whole new range of tags to consider!