Better recommendations filters, including tags

The Recommendations feature now has three new filters—tags, more complex dates, and authors.

• Tags is a "tag mirror" allowing you to filter your recs by common tags. Or you can add your own
• Dates allows you to filter by various choices (e.g., "last 10 years") or enter your own date range
• Authors allows you to see recs for your own authors alone, or to exclude your authors

Recommendations is at: https://www.librarything.com/recommendations

Let us know what you think!

Feature was made by @knerd.knitter and @conceptdawg. Lots of great work in there.

Here's some screenshots:

That looks awesome :)

Is the "date" component coming from the earliest copy, the earliest copy on your language or the CK Original date (and if all 3 exist, is it "oldest takes all" or is there an hierarchy?

PS: Can you post again the URL for the list of dismissed recommendations so I can clear that one up? (and find a place for it on that page maybe?)

>2 AnnieMod:

It's what we determine is the publication date. If there's a CK date, we use that—the first one listed. If there isn't, it's from… well, every source we use. It's not always right. In particular, a lot of books are dated "2021" or whatever, even if the reality is "2021-06." This affects things especially when you're asking for books published in the last X months. It might miss those.

In general we need to do a better job of showing people what the dates are. We added them to work pages once in the past and people rebelled. We need to do it again, better.

T

>2 AnnieMod: https://www.librarything.com/recommendations/MEMBERNAME/dismissed

>5 knerd.knitter: Thanks! I forgot to put my name in there in the middle. :)

>3 timspalding: Thanks! That explains what I am seeing I think.

>7 Taliesien: Yes, I know that. I forgot I need to include a name in there at all when I tried to work out the url.

Being able to see new books by my authors is excellent! That filter is definitely going to give me an extra reason to check my recommendations.

Thanks much for the tag filter!

Tag filter work well, I'm definitely going to find uses for it!

@knerd.knitter, there seems to be a bug with excluding one's authors. I do that, and filter for fantasy, and get a recommendation for a book by Liz Williams, a author we have many books by. Might it be because there are several distinct authors with the same name?

This is great in I can drill down to get more specific recommendations if I want to. So if nothing at the top of the history recommendations grabs my interest I can look at the tags and decide that I'm in the mood for ancient history.

Although I did find it confusing how the New Books button interacts with the more specific time frame under the control icon. Does the specific time frame override the New Books/All Time toggle or does it define what New Books means?

>12 anglemark: I have seen this myself with authors; looks like when you click the author it goes to the disambiguation page instead of to a specific author page; maybe that work isn't assigned to the right author?

>14 jjwilson61: When you pick a specific time frame both New Books and All Time are unhighlighted so it's just using the filter.

>15 knerd.knitter: Looking at the copies of the work, one of them wasn't assigned to an author, so that might have been the problem. I wonder if you can tweak what the algorithm looks at, so it doesn't recommend a work this way. However, I will not know whether assigning the work helps until the recommendations are recalculated.

>16 anglemark: If the work is fixed then the filter should properly include/exclude authors. You shouldn't need to wait for recommendations to be recalculated.

Edit: At least, I think that's the case.

>17 knerd.knitter: I am still recommended that work, Embertide, when I filter for fantasy, excluding my authors.

>18 anglemark: Okay, I'm not sure why that is. But when you click the author on that recommendation it still goes to the disambiguation page, and I'm not sure why.

>19 knerd.knitter: It does not for me - it goes to https://www.librarything.com/author/williamsliz-1 when you go from the work page.

Maybe it needed some time to sort itself? Or if someone is clicking from the recommendations, maybe there is a delay/something out of sync?

>20 AnnieMod: The link in the popout box goes to williamsliz-1, the one on the page goes to williamsliz. At least for me.

>21 anglemark: That is weird - I looked at the work page itself here: https://www.librarything.com/work/28225159 and it goes to -1

I start wondering if there is a server out of sync?

PS: Or do you mean the recommendation page and not the work page?

>22 AnnieMod: Yes, the Recommendations page. That's where all the weirdness is.

The filters aren't being persisted if I click on a link to view a book and return via the back button. This is inconsistent with how other parts of the page work: if I select a genre that selection is still applied when I follow a recommendation link and go back to the pafe.

This looks fantastic! I'm excited to dive in!

Is there a way to see every recommendation that is _not_ tagged something or which does _not_ have a particular genre? For example, excluding all YA recommendations?

Oh I love the NOT variation. It's hard to come by here, but useful.

Just found out about this new feature and it is very exciting. My first question is how to interpret the order of any retrieved list of books. Can someone explain the ordering criteria?

I have seen a number of infinite looping "loading" results. I believe that some of these happened when I had a Tag selected along with the Combined Recommendations.

Also, I never returned any results when the tag was' literary Mystery' for any of the primary genres.

I wish the literature, or literary tag was available all the time. For me it seems to come and go. literary Fiction seems to be available most often, but not always.

I have about 350 books in my library which are tagged as Literary-Mystery. Does the precise spelling matter?

The tags in the list are based on how the tags of everyone that owns that work, or maybe it's everyone who has a similar library to yours depending on how similar it is. In any case it's not based on your tags alone and a tag will only appear if it meets a certain threshold.

>28 jjwilson61: Is that the prevalence index?

More experimentation led to answering my own question about the literature, or literary tag availability. I finally saw that I could enter any tag I wanted, and it would be used for the filter. This led me to more books in the history fiction category that I am interested in.

I still do not obtain many of the books I want to read, but there are some interesting possibilities.

I also have confirmed that you can't apply any tag to the Combined Recommendations without obtaining an infinite loading twirl.

>30 JoeB1934: There was a bug causing that page not to come back. I am fixing it.

>31 knerd.knitter: Thanks, that is a big help.

I can do a New Books for Combined Recommendations and the tag literary fiction, and the first page has a good number of proposed books that I have had my eye on.

Your bug fix made this very useful to me in future years, I already have a plan on what to read in 2023.

How do you get to Add Books Express other than here

>33 JoeB1934: There's a big green button on every work page

>34 norabelle414: I've always disliked the routine located at Add books because, as near as I can tell if you click on a book title it is added to my library. Usually I prefer to go to the work page and then decide. Am I doing this process incorrectly?

If you click on a title on the add books page, yes, it is added to your library. Until then, the information in the source is not connected to any LT work.

>35 JoeB1934: Whatever method works for you is the correct way to add a book.

>35 JoeB1934:

If you click on the little question-mark icon at the right of the search result in Add Books it will expand to show you the details of that record before you add it. It won't give you LT-specific or "social" information, but it will help you know if you're adding the book you're actually looking for.