Find a Book You Own Which is Tagged by Someone Else?

Apologies if the title is a little confusing.

If I'm looking for a book about a certain topic or which is part of a certain subgenre, it's pretty easy to find a tag and look through the books that have that tag. Sometimes I can take notice of books which I have because they will have a symbol indicating I own the work. However, as of yet, I have not found a way to look at only books I own with a specific tag, unless I am the one who tagged them as such.

I'm sure there's something I'm overlooking because this seems like such an intuitive feature for LT to have. So, how can find the list of books I own which someone, at some point, has tagged with a specific tag like 'cosy fantasy' or 'sheep'?

I think you want the Tag Mirror on your profile page under Clouds.

Link to Tag Mirror: https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/tagmirror

Thank you for the links to Tag Mirror. This isn't quite what I'm looking for, unless there are settings or bits that I've missed.

Tag Mirror, from my understanding, is only the 50/250/1000/whatever number setting you have it on most used tags for all the books you have logged, total. So if I don't have enough books that have been tagged as 'cosy fantasy' or 'sheep,' I still can't look that up from within my own books.

Of course, if I've missed a feature somewhere, and I actually can use this feature to look up any tag regardless of its relative popularity among the works I specifically have copies of, I welcome any corrections. Just point me towards the appropriate settings to change.

If Tim has limited it to only a set number of the most popular tags then there must be a reason for it. Probably because it would take too many site resources to allow more than that.

>5 jjwilson61: I agree it would likely take too many resources to create a tag mirror out of every tag which has ever been applied to every book a user owns. That's not really what I'm looking for. I just want to search my own catalogue for books which have, at some point, been tagged with the specific tag I'm searching. You can already do this with all the books on the site. I'm trying to figure out how to look at only my books.

>6 GraceCollection: No you can't. Each tag page is limited to the most frequently tagged books. If you follow 'sleep' to the end, you are still in books that have been tagged sleep twice. 'WWII' only shows you books tagged that way at least 55 times.

>6 GraceCollection: I agree, it would be nice to be able to toggle between all books and books in my catalogue on a tag page.

>1 GraceCollection: I think you can do something like that by collecting all the tag mirrors of all your books. But it is a lot of work. I wrote a script to do it in a gentle way, so I wouldn't be annoying LT servers too much. And yes, it allows you to look for your books that have been tagged by others in an interesting way. And no, I don't think you can do this in a simpler way.

>1 GraceCollection: This has been frequently suggested, but staff are not in favor because they would rather users tag their own books than rely on other users' tags.

Examples:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/343087 (2022)
https://www.librarything.com/topic/184633 (2014)
https://www.librarything.com/topic/349547 (2023)

>10 norabelle414: If I'm being honest, that seems a little silly. If seeing other tags somehow dissuaded users from using their own, why allow tags to be public at all? I can look at my tag mirror, do a site search, or click on any book to see tags other people used. Why is suddenly using other people's tags in one slightly different way going to collapse all desire from the userbase to use their own tags?

Found a weird workaround. If I can find a user's library that has the tag in their TagMirror, I can figure out what numerical identity has been assigned to that tag, and then use inspect element to tell javascript to search my library for that tag id instead of theirs.

Anyone have 'cosy fantasy' in their TagMirror? :)

>12 GraceCollection: Ah, that was a great hint. Here is a way to display all the books in your library which others have tagged Humor (Humor = 142, which I found looking at Tim Spaidings tagmirror).

https://www.librarything.com/ajax_tagmirror_tagtobooks.php?view=gracecollection&...

which is the same as you see on

https://www.librarything.com/stats/gracecollection/tagmirror

Humor works because you have used the tag yourself, but maybe some tags are interesting although you don't use them yourself.

I.e. I don't use the tag gutenberg

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/bnielsen?&deepsearch=tag%3A%20gutenberg

so it doesn't show up in my tagmirror. But I can take a book that someone else tagged with gutenberg and then work backwards and find it in their tagmirror and see that id = 16392.

https://www.librarything.com/ajax_tagmirror_tagtobooks.php?view=gracecollection&...

ETA

I have no idea of how to convert between 16392 and gutenberg or vise versa. (I tried to do it with 'cosy fantasy' and didn't have any luck.)

ETA

I don't think any users have 'cosy fantasy' in their TagMirror. Probably because of what you guessed in >4 GraceCollection: I.e. the few users who use 'cosy fantasy' only use it very sparingly and so it doesn't show up in their tag mirror. I guess a workaround would be to create a test account with say 10 books and tag all of them with "cosy fantasy". You could then look at the TagMirror of the test account and see what the number for 'cosy fantasy' is.

>13 bnielsen: Aha! You've discovered a simpler workaround than my little Javascript adventure. Thank you! I will definitely be using that moving forward.

As for the 'humor' tag, I don't use it myself! (if I did, I'd use 'humour' instead ;) It shows up in my tag mirror because lots of people have tagged books I happen to have with that tag! My tag use is rather boring and, at this time, mostly used to highlight cataloguing errors. Most of my books have 0 tags added by me.

I found that most people used the Yank spelling, 'cozy fantasy,' instead of 'cosy fantasy,' (I did propose a tag combination for these two spellings of the same concept) but I still couldn't locate anyone with it in their tag mirror. I did find 'cozy' by itself, which I compared to my library and just searched manually for fantasy books within the (short) list of 'cozy.' (For anyone wondering, I did not have any cosy/cozy fantasy in my library. Something for me to look into adding!)

>14 GraceCollection: Nice summation. I don't think I've yet figured out how the TagMirror for users work. Also I don't know if it is always displayed in a given user's profile under Clouds.

ETA

Hmm, I need some links to talk about this, so here goes:

https://www.librarything.com/tag/cozy%20fantasy shows some info about the tag "cozy fantasy"

One of the people using it is @lyrrael, but it doesn't show up in that user's tagmirror:
https://www.librarything.com/stats/lyrrael/tagmirror

although it is used on 27 of the books in that library.

@joeb1934 doesn't use the tag fiction and the tagmirror also doesn't.
https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=Fiction&view=joeb1934

https://www.librarything.com/stats/JoeB1934/tagmirror

I found a user with a lot of books and tags, but tagmirror isn't shown on the profile:

https://www.librarything.com/profile/bit-of-a-list-tiger

>16 bnielsen: It is possible for users to stop the feature being available as a direct link on the profile page, via Settings > Your Books > Other Settings > Hide tag mirror.

>17 Nevov: Thanks. I didn't know that. (But I can see that the tagmirror takes a long time to generate for libraries with lots of books, so it makes good sense.)

Ah, this is fun. I tried finding books in my collection that I hadn't tagged as erotica but others had.
I.e. https://www.librarything.com/ajax_tagmirror_tagtobooks.php?view=bnielsen&tag... and then look for those I don't think is erotica. (And being a programmer, I wrote a script to find them).
First hit was https://www.librarything.com/work/17874/263376310 which I find very funny but not erotic. But I can also see that someone else might think otherwise and tag it with the tag erotica.

>19 bnielsen: You've convinced me that I want to read it.

>20 MarthaJeanne: Yes, you really should. (I'm currently rereading Persepolis.)

>21 bnielsen: The library has it (in German), and I've put a hold on it.

Back to this thread: I've learned some more, I think. I can now get the tagmirror for a user with any number of tags (i.e. not only the 100, 250, 500, 1000 that one can select on the tagmirror page).
But for my own tagmirror this will give me no more than 2129 tags.
So the observation in >4 GraceCollection: that we don't see all tags in the mirror seems to hold. (Which is a fine thing since I guess the combined tagmirror of all my books would be far greater and pretty useless.)

I can also (via a script) get the combination of Tag-text and Tag-ID, i.e. the tag Harry Potter has ID 3.
This allows me to see that someone tagged "Consider Her Ways and Others" by John Wyndham with the tag Harry Potter.

GraceCollection's tagmirror maxes out at 1221 tags. Here are the lower numbered ones. (And I'm still not sure any of this is useful, but it is fun to explore the tagmirror :-)

And no cosy fantasy :-)

2 fiction
3 Harry Potter
4 magic
6 children's
7 read
8 series
9 children
10 wizards
13 children's literature
15 British
16 own
17 children's fiction
18 England
19 adventure
20 school
21 juvenile
22 witches
24 kids
26 boarding school
36 literature
41 juvenile fiction
43 hardcover
46 mystery
48 friendship
51 youth
52 witchcraft
62 sff
63 orphans
65 coming of age
67 Britain
80 classic
89 school stories
97 contemporary
100 supernatural
106 urban fantasy
109 English literature
110 speculative fiction
111 Great Britain
113 uk
129 film
132 classics
137 dragons
138 family
141 Youth Fiction
142 humor
150 friends
158 witch
159 Irish
166 ghosts
174 chapter book
176 middle grade
188 horror
208 childhood

I've combined my own and a couple of other tag mirrors to get this list.

https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/User:Bnielsen/TagId

I wonder if others might find it useful too. @GraceCollection ?

I've combined my own and a couple of other tag mirrors to get this list.

https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/User:Bnielsen/TagId

I wonder if others might find it useful too. @GraceCollection ?

The idea is that you find an interesting tag in the list.
Let us take TAG 631383; American South
You then combine your username and this tag to get something like this for me

https://www.librarything.com/ajax_tagmirror_tagtobooks.php?view=bnielsen&tag...

or this for GraceCollection

https://www.librarything.com/ajax_tagmirror_tagtobooks.php?view=GraceCollection&...

>23 bnielsen: Thank you for this! It is very interesting. Intriguing that I've only 3 books tagged 'Harry Potter' when I've the whole original series and a few of the extras...

>25 bnielsen: This is very useful! Thank you so much for sharing it.

>27 GraceCollection: And thanks for starting this thread. I had a ton of fun figuring out what went on behind the panels :-)

Alas, the Wiki pages gives me Gateway Timeout at the moment, but hopefully that'll be fixed during the day.

And now the wiki pages are up again. I've realised that one thing to come out of this is the ability to get a larger tag mirror (i.e. not limited to 1000 tags). So mine currently looks like this:

https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/User:Bnielsen/MyTagmirror

and the sort of random list I made here:
https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/User:Bnielsen/TagId

contain a lot of tags that don't apply to my books.

I just got another idea:

The MyTagmirror list can be used as input to a script that finds Book_Id's for each tag.
i.e. the tag "Beck" is number 627161 and
https://www.librarything.com/ajax_tagmirror_tagtobooks.php?view=bnielsen&tag...
gives the Book_Id's

59081004
89207301
58617713
56674438
59252240
59231135
59252244
58617394
58331894
53763842
59252250

This can then be turned into a list that for each book in my library gives the tags that others have applied to it. (This is similar to the tagmirror/tagcloud for the book, but much smaller).

A fun fact is that Book_Id 199890593 is also tagged with "Beck" when I look at its tagmirror/tagcloud but it's not on the list above. I.e. I think of the above list as making more sense.

I worked a bit more with this idea, taking the data into a local database, so I can do things like:

$ cat /tmp/lt.rdb | perl /tmp/row Others_Tag_List mat '/nordic noir/' and not Tag_List mat '/Crime/' | perl /tmp/column Primary_Author Book_Id Title | perl /tmp/headchg --delete | sort

Adler-Olsen, Jussi 262827214 Alfabethuset
Adler-Olsen, Jussi 264530783 Washington dekretet
Ahnhem, Stefan 250183377 Atten grader minus
Davidsen, Leif 235867402 Lime's billede
Jungersen, Christian 122440102 Undtagelsen
Lindqvist, John Ajvide 138473117 Menneskehavn

I.e. easily finding books that others have tagged with 'nordic noir' and I haven't even bothered tagging with 'Crime'. I can find the books tagged 'nordic noir' from my normal tagmirror:

https://www.librarything.com/stats/bnielsen/tagmirror

but filtering them based on my own tags can't be done.