Improvements to tagmash, tag, genre and LCC pages

I've made a number of improvements to the tagmash, tag, genre and LCC pages. Update: And MDS.

1. All pages now follow the shelf-or-titles pattern. This means that tagmashes, which were formerly just a text list, now look like tag pages. You can look at the covers, or you switch to titles. The look and feel of these shelves has been improved, with slightly larger covers, matching other shelves elsewhere, and more shelves. The shelf/title switcher has been moved to the top, alongside the filters (see below).

Examples:
https://www.librarything.com/tag/paranormal%20romance (tag: Paranormal romance)
https://www.librarything.com/tag/Greek%2C%20historiography (tagmash: Greek + historiography)
https://www.librarything.com/genre/39/Horror (genre: Horror)
https://www.librarything.com/lcc/PS8001-8599 (LCC: PS8001-8599, Canadian Literature)
See https://www.librarything.com/mds/560 (MDS 560 Fossils)

2. Tagmashes are faster. I've switched to the tagmash algorithm we use behind the scenes on Talpa. It should be faster, often dramatically so.(1)

Examples:
https://www.librarything.com/tag/France%2C%20YA

Go do your own!

3. All four have much better filtering options. All four have filters for Publication (i.e., publication date). And all four also allow filtering by media—allowing members to see only titles that have an audiobook or ebook. This existed on some pages, but was based on what we knew of Kindle and Audio. The new filter is based on whether we've seen an ebook or audiobook for the title. While exactitude about the supplier would be ideal, the data is much richer if it's just "is there an audiobook?" Most ebooks and audiobooks are available on most platforms, and if they aren't, LibraryThing can't keep up with other companies' stock and offers.

If you're filtering something large, like all books under the LCC class "E," the system can be slow. I hope it's still useful.

Tags also have a sort option: "Count," "Weighted" and "Popular." This existed before in a different way. It should be clearer now.

---

1. The new system is based on bitwise operations. Each large tag has a precomputed bitset—one bit per work we know about (>35M), set to 1 if the work has that tag. To combine tags (e.g., YA and Fantasy), we take the two bitsets and perform a bitwise AND to get the intersection. Once we have that subset, we query for counts and other details. It may sound heavy, but it’s much faster, especially when the sets intersect minimally, because we don't need to get the counts on works that don't intersect.

Great! Is there a particular reason why MDS pages were not included? Also, why not include various sorts on all? Sounds useful

I'll look into adding MDS and some others--subjects, BISAC, CK pages. The page has a very different structure, but there's still a shelf.

As for sorts, it's a matter of efficiency. Tags have two natural ways to sort, the others do not. But I'm open to suggestions.

Cool. While we're on tags and mashings: for awards, the tags section at the bottom of each awards page has links for each tag that just go to a global tag search. Wouldn't it be more useful to have them to filter to works with a given tag that are associated with the particular award (at least as an option)?

Neat!

Just curious. As of a couple of years, the Related Tags tag clouds at the bottom of pages never use the tag translations. Is there a reason for that?

My tally so far:

Translated
Tag https://www.librarything.com/tag/noir
Work pages https://www.librarything.com/work/28684/t/Langenscheidts-Pocket-Latin-Dictionary
MDS https://www.librarything.com/mds/477
Author https://www.librarything.com/author/vargasfred
Lists https://www.librarything.com/list/47509/The-Five-Books-That-Represent-Us

Not Translated
Genres https://www.librarything.com/genre/20/Non-fiction-générale
Awards https://www.librarything.com/award/3724/Cundill-History-Prize
LCC https://www.librarything.com/lcc/HV6251-6773.55
Series https://www.librarything.com/nseries/4/Robert-Langdon
Tag cloud https://www.librarything.com/zeitgeist/tagcloud

>6 timspalding: Okay, I might have exaggerated. Or rather, I went by my impression. But will this change?

Coulgd we have a setting to automatically get titles instead of having to switch it every time?

I changed it to titles when i tried it earlier and it seems to have remembered it.

>8 MarthaJeanne:

Is it not sticking for you? It's a separate "stick" on every type, but it should stick.

>6 timspalding:

All of these are now translated.

How's that? (Don't thank me. Thank Claude Code on this one.)

>2 SandraArdnas: Great! Is there a particular reason why MDS pages were not included?

MDS has been added to the list.

See https://www.librarything.com/mds/560

I have flipped the left and the right, so the cover/titles selector and any sort selectors are on the left. The filter options are on the right. It seems to me the former are going to be used more and are more central, so they should be on the left. People have a bad habit of not seeing things that are on the right.

>12 timspalding: Thank you 😍

>11 timspalding: That's nothing short of brilliant! My thanks to you and Claude Code!

>10 timspalding: Seems ro be stickung now, but it sure hasn't in the past.

>12 timspalding: Where titles are sorted by popularity, please could you also display the publication year and number of copies, in the same ways that it's displayed on it's author's page.

So for in your MDS 560 example, display the first title as:
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989) 2,940 copies, 34 reviews.

Then it's possible to see at a glance whether the differences in popularity between titles are actually significant, or whether in fact there are just hundreds of titles each with only a few copies, in a fairly random order.

Also an author page style toggle between "Popular" and "Recent" would be useful.

>16 MarthaJeanne: And I'm back to covers again. Yuck!

>18 MarthaJeanne: Probably because they pushed an update

>18 MarthaJeanne: once you select a list, it should stay on that. If it's not staying on that, let us know because that's a bug. But we did push an update that might have reset the settings.

This looks like a great feature. However, at the moment I'm feeling really dumb about asking this, but how do you get this to display? When I click on my Tags option from my home page, then select a tag, change the view to cover. I don't see any of this.

Is there a specific way to navigate to this information? Do I need to log out and log back in.

I feel dumb for asking, but I cannot see any of this information when I go to my tags, or navigate the way I should. I'm using a Chrome browser.

>21 FiLoMa: The feature is for the site level display of tags, not the display in your catalog.

So let's take one of your tags that is used by other people as well as an example:
https://www.librarything.com/tag/genre-romance

Do you see the new information/filters now?

You get to that page when you click on the tag from a work page for example - or simply use site search.

Thanks Annie. That was my mistake, thinking it was from my catalog.
I appreciate you explaining how I needed to navigate to that information.
I realised that I don't usually scroll down that far on the works page. This is something I can now check out.

>23 FiLoMa: You can rearrange the modules on the work page to suit your needs. 'Customize View' at the bottom of the right sidebar

Is there any chance you can add the authors back into the results list? I generally prefer the list to the covers, but not if I can't see the authors. Covers still aren't great because it's often harder to read or to find the title and/or author. That's why the lists are better. But as it is now, the covers are the best of the bad options in order to see the authors.

I know I'm just seeing this a month later, but I do use this around this time each month (last month must have been a bit earlier when I did my tagmashes (choosing my reading for the following month)), so I do use tagmashes quite a bit.

I am also not crazy about all the empty white space, though that's a much smaller thing. I'd just prefer it if the authors were listed like on the old lists.

>25 LibraryCin: Same, list with authors, please.

We can definitely get the authors back in there. They should be there and it's a bug in code.
We can also add title/author under the covers.

The tagmash (and tag) pages are updated to include more title/author info in the shelves/lists. The update should be available in a few minutes.

>28 conceptDawg: Thank you so much!

ETA: I also quite like the covers now that they have title and author underneath, as well!

>29 LibraryCin: Good to hear.