Virtual Shelves = Real Shelves

Perhaps this has already been discussed but I was wondering if it would be possible to define virtual shelves to mirror the real shelves in my library. In other words, my wife's cook book collection takes up a large area in our library and it would be nice to be able to note on the book's entry in LT where it resides in the physical library. Yes, I know I can tag the book with some field but I'd rather simply note the shelf in some manner and then enter all the books on that shelf. This way, the shelf is known at entry time, not added after the fact, one book at a time.

This still involves using tags, but it might work for your purposes:

When you enter books from the "add books" tab, you can specify a tag at that point. (Look to the second field down) So, for example, type in "shelf1" and add all your wife's books. The tag will automatically add to the books you enter and will stay there to go on additional books until you leave the "add books" page or erase the tag from the field.

Thank you for pointing this out; I didn't realize that the tags defined in that area of the Add Books form were persistent across books. That should work for what I intend to do with her cooking collection.

However, this does raise the question about how meaningful such a tag would be to others. If I use something akin to the Dewey Decimal System such that “Shelf 01.04” meant “The first case to the right of the door, fourth shelf from the top,” would not this information be useless to anyone who happened to look at my collection? Worse yet, I would think such miscellaneous information would be bothersome to people, having to wade through what would amount to nonsense to someone not versed in whatever method I use. Might it be better to define some tags that would be essentially private? They would be tags like any other but would have an added attribute, namely, of being visible only to the owner.

Anyway, that is simply a thought. I can definitely use the persisent tag feature as you described it. Thank you again for bringing it to my attention.

Well, Tim likes the "noise" caused in the tag cloud by personal tags, because he is "in love with data". Or something. :-)

>3 Educazione: I think that personal tags can sometimes be the most oddly helpful, and so I don't like the idea of private tags because then some people might put their (potentially helpful or amusing) opinion tags like "thrown away" or "best book ever!" in private, rather than letting everyone get a flavour for what people honestly think of a book. Obviously not all tags (like location tags) are the most helpful, but the ones tagged frequently come up bigger and overwhelm the insignificant ones already :)

As noted above, Tim does not see a problem with "tag pollution" so encourages all those "personal tags".

Frankly, I only have TWO tags, "Finished ..." and "Filed ...", so there is "nothing but noise" being contributed to the LT tag universe from me.

You might find my location tag format useful, however ... each book has a unique tag based on the bookCase it's in, the Shelf it's on, and which Book on that shelf it is ... such as "filed c10-s3-b32" which would be the 32nd book on the third shelf of what I've determined to be bookcase #10.

Since I do a reverse-sort on the tag field, this results in my library appearing in my LT catalog in exactly the same shelf order it does on my bookshelves!

 

BTRIPP, Brilliant! I was wondering how I could tag my books so I could actually find them. This looks like it might work for me. The only trick would be remembering to put the books back in the right place, instead of leaving them lying about where I've read them. I don't think tagging will help that. :-)

#6 What happenes to your numbering system if you slip a new book into a shelf?
My fiction bookcases are alphabeticle by author.
Non-fiction are by subject; science, history, engineering, etc.

The answer to tag pollution is more tags. That is, when a book has 100 tags, it doesn't matter if somebody tagged it with something personal. Tagging scales! :)

I'm with #8 here: English SF goes to one location, math and physics to another, etc. (And the
last thousand or so just slip in where there's a little bit of space left).

The answer to tag pollution is more tags. (#9)

An answer? Yes. The answer? I'm sure we can find a better one. I'm having enough trouble keeping my own tagging structure from being overwhelming -- not so much because of the number of tags but because of the number of different kinds of tags (subject, location, status, origin, and so on). Adding even more tags to my tag structure would make it even more overwhelming.

Another fault in hyper-tagging is that it really doesn't take into account obscure books. I should hardly need to explain that the fewer people have a particular book, the fewer people can tag it; or that the fewer the people who can tag it, the fewer the people who will. Hence, greater book obscurity means greater tag noise. For a book that only two or three people own, that could mean noise loud enogh to knock over small trees.

Ah but more tags IS the answer, in more ways than one. I think what we really need is to be able to tag our tags (or group), label them 'Location', 'series title', 'series number', subject, or whatever else we would like to group them in.

I should hardly need to explain that the fewer people have a particular book, the fewer people can tag it; or that the fewer the people who can tag it, the fewer the people who will. Hence, greater book obscurity means greater tag noise.

I don't think you can really complain about noise obscuring the information if there's no information there to be obscured.

Not only is it an answer, but yes, it is the answer. And not only does tagging scale, as Tim mentioned, it really only gains real global value through scaling.

100 tags might be useful.
100,000 tags are most certainly useful.
100,000,000 tags are a veritable gold mine of information.

Conversely, if you find that tag pollution gets in your way for your local catalog you can certainly control that by not using them. In fact, you can control tag pollution on the global scale as well. Most of the time that you see polluted tags it is because there are few tags attributed to the item. Add more relevant tags to the item and the garbage tags will eventually fall off the bottom.

Conversely, if you find that tag pollution gets in your way for your local catalog you can certainly control that by not using them.

Ugh.
"Can we have {insert feature here}?"
"No, use tags!"
"I have too many tags."
"Don't use tags!"

Ugh.
"Can we have {insert feature here}?"
"No, use tags!"
"I have too many tags."
"Don't use tags!" (#15)

I hate being told that, too. That's why I positively will not be convinced that tags are "the" answer until there's a way to reduce the noise pollution. Case in point:

Not only is it an answer, but yes, it is the answer.

> ... <

Conversely, if you find that tag pollution gets in your way for your local catalog you can certainly control that by not using them. (#14)

But how can I drown out the noise without using tags?

I don't think you can really complain about noise obscuring the information if there's no information there to be obscured. (#13)

You're overstating what I said (go back and re-read it if you don't believe me). I never said that obscure books have no tags/taggers, only fewer tags/taggers. And fewer tags are going to have to work awfully hard if they're going to drown out the noise. See also,

Most of the time that you see polluted tags it is because there are few tags attributed to the item. (#14)

Few tags is often the result of few potential taggers. Note also that on such items, the system sometimes assigns a different weight to one tag than to another tag applied just as often. I'll go hunt for an example when I've gotten this message up.

I think what we really need is to be able to tag our tags (or group), label them 'Location', 'series title', 'series number', subject, or whatever else we would like to group them in. (#12)

This happening might actually get me to shut up about the over-hyping of tags (which is NOT to say that I'd change my mind and agree about it), provided that one could view similarly tagged tags as a group. They have this on del.icio.us. They're called bundles, and you can add a single tag to more than one if you like.

Edited to fix HTML and re-word sentence to match what I meant.

I've edited that last post twice now, largely to hunt down and fix errors in my HTML, so I'm posting this as a new message.

I found a book with tag weight issues, The Ultimate French Review and Practice. Showing the numbers revealed the following:

448(1) @ pc(1) foreign language(1) French(1) Language; French(1) verbs(1) workbook(1)

There's also an example here of how layered tags might be useful. I'll claim the first two tags: "448" is the start of its Dewey Decimal number (448.2421), and "PC" is the start of its Library of Congress number (PC2271 .S76 2006). The latter has an "@" in front of it so that the LC numbers will sort together on my tag list: I like having the ability to see only those books that fall within a range of sortable numbers (like call numbers). Why? Because showing that section, and only that section, cuts down on noise. But I don't regard it as noise in itself, since both systems assign numbers by subject, and so they do say something about the work.

Perhaps on work pages, tags can nest like folders do in many programs, so that a "call numbers" bundle or a "location" bundle or a "status" bundle could have a little button next to it: if this information is right up your alley, click in the little button and you can see these tags.

At one point, Tim did say that he was interested in the del.icio.us tag bundle concept. It's probably way down on the implementation priority list though.

I must have missed that. In the meantime, I wish people wouldn't treat tagging as a panacea. There are things that could be much better handled elsewhere, some with what seem -- to me, anyway -- like simple fixes.

>19 AnnaClaire:

Agreed, mostly. To some extent Common Knowledge is that solution. It's user-contributed but there's only one answer, and there are some rules.

And I didn't mean don't use tags in general. Just "don't use" garbage tags if you don't like them. Wrong choice of words. I'm from the Deep South....english is a second language most of the time. :) You're lucky I don't use "ya'll" in every post.

And there are a few fields -- like the date acquired/started/finished fields -- that I wish would behave a little more like Common Knowledge. Allowing us to enter approximate dates for these fields would cut down on tags like "read in 2001". Since I think most people would rather put that information in the field designated for it than as a tag, but that data would lose most of its value the minute you actually do finish a book on the first or last (or whatever workaround you use) day of the month.

(BONUS: Examples from my own reading:

First of the month: Ivanhoe, July 2003. Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart, March 2005. The Civilization of the Middle Ages, December 2005.
Last of the month: The Life of Elizabeth I, July 2006.
New Year's Near Miss: Sense and Sensibility*, January 2, 2003.
Other near misses are numerous, and include quite a few other books finished on the 2nd. (Groundhogs, anyone?)

And that was just from my pen-on-paper notes.

In short, rougher dates à la Common Knowledge would neatly provide a quality-control measure for everyone that would also quiet the tag noise for people like me who like our tags quiet.

* Yes, I know it's not in my catalog, but I borrowed it from my mother. (She has Austen's complete works edited by R. W. Chapman, who is a notable authority on Jane Austen.)

re: #8 - "What happenes to your numbering system if you slip a new book into a shelf?"

Would never happen.

I have been filing my books by order read for nearly a quarter century, which allows me to back-track through the "cognitive flow" easily, which I find useful in terms of being able to triangulate when I encountered what concepts and where those stood in relation to other concepts, etc.

It helps that I read nearly zero fiction ... I'm guessing that fiction represents only about 1% of my reading over the past 20 years ... and the temptation is far less to want to file all the Idries Shah books together, than the Terry Pratchett books, for example.

 

#23: I understand your system now and can see it's usefulness. We have different systems for different reasons.