tagging dewey categories

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tagging dewey categories

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1souci
Nov 8, 2008, 8:15 pm

This message has been deleted by its author.

2souci
Nov 8, 2008, 8:19 pm

I can't seem to find any libraries tagged using dewey numbers. I am interested in this challenge. I started tagging actual dewey numbers, then grouped into 100's, 200's, 300's etc. to have meaningful tags instead of one-offs, at least to start. Now I am looking to harmonize with how the group tracks, tags and compares, but I can't find anyone doing this.

Help! Anybody? Anybody??

Souci

(Previous post deleted because I couldn't correct a spelling error. Sorry)

3_Zoe_
Nov 9, 2008, 11:37 am

Welcome to the challenge!

I'm not sure that anyone has tried tagging their DDC books. Most of us have a thread in this group where we track what we've read, and there are various other threads where we've listed suggestions for the 200s, 300s, etc.

Also, in the top right of your posts there's a little pencil that you can click on to edit--or at least, there's supposed to be.

4tututhefirst
Nov 9, 2008, 1:03 pm

Souci...I haven't tagged my books, but did add a DDC column to one of my views so I can then sort by dewey number. I've also embarked on retro-editing my library which is large (almost 2000) and will get much larger if I ever get the 60+ cartons in the attic unpacked and cataloged.

I've also just started adding books I don't own with tags nil (not in library) so I can track books for specific challenges that I want to read or have read and want to review. If I put in a Dewey # as I add new books, and try to find 10 a week for old ones, I'll eventually get there. Not being able to power edit the dewey field (where we could batch plug in 813, or 823, etc for all the fictions) is a real drag. But since I don't intend to finish this challenge before my 100th birthday, and let's just say that's still a generation away, I'm not in too much of a rush.

5tututhefirst
Nov 9, 2008, 1:05 pm

Just had a BFO (Brilliant Flash of Obvious). Maybe if we all start off the challenge by doing the top levels first (100,200,etc), then go to the 10th level next (010, 110, 210, 220, 230) etc, and only THEN try to get into the 100th level weeds, the task might not be as intimidating.

Tina (AKA Tutu the first)

6_Zoe_
Nov 9, 2008, 6:41 pm

>5 tututhefirst: Yup, I think I'm sort of trying to do that. I'm not avoiding books in other categories, but I'm looking forward to completing the easier levels in the foreseeable future. I think 600 is the only category I have left for my 10-book challenge!

Another good sub-challenge is aiming for each of the 10s in a category you're particularly interested in (say, one from the 400s, the 410s, the 420s, etc.), or even each of the 1s in a specific sub-category (410, 411, 412, etc.). I'm hoping that while I focus on little things the big challenge will somehow end up completing itself ;)

7The_Kat_Cache
Edited: Nov 9, 2008, 6:58 pm

I think tagging for Dewey decimal numbers is brilliant! That way, if someone wants to find a good 938, for example, they can just search for the tag and find out what's available and even look at reviews. Brilliant. I think I'll go tag my non-fiction books right now.

ETA: At least some people are already using tags in this way. For example, AnnaClaire seems to be tagging DD numbers:

http://www.librarything.com/tags/AnnaClaire

8DaynaRT
Edited: Dec 1, 2008, 12:54 pm

I've started tagging categories using a DDxxx format. For now I'm only doing this for books I'm using in the Challenge. Might as well do them all while I'm at it.

9AnnaClaire
Dec 1, 2008, 12:51 pm

>7 The_Kat_Cache:
I am indeed tagging DD numbers. (LC numbers, too.)

For both sets, I start the tag with an "@" followed by the three-digit number, or, for LC, the initial letters. Hence, @ 942 or @ E.

Using the symbol for Deweys is new: I was getting some of the 100's sorting with the century tags, so I needed to introduce something to keep the herd together.

10E59F
Mar 21, 2009, 6:55 pm

I've added DDC and LCC tags to most of my books (I didn't do the 813s and 823s, on the assumption that people here generally aren't lacking for those). Since I was doing both, I figured it made sense to follow AnnaClaire's system rather than fleela's, so the same tag pages that have AnnaClaire's books will also have mine, once they make their way into the cache.

Admittedly, most of them are books that most people would never want to read, but people might find some useful ones amongst them.

I'll try to keep doing these tags as I continue entering more of my books.

11amckie
Mar 21, 2009, 7:40 pm

Hmmm I had never considered tagging books with the DD and LC numbers... but now I am very tempted to do it!! Thinking I might change current tags to .tags and use the @ for DD and LC, to keep it similar to a few people here. I also love how it makes it easier to go check out some different categories :)

*scurries off to add everyone with tags to interesting library list!*

12GoofyOcean110
May 3, 2009, 6:13 am

I don't think I'm going to tag my books with either Dewey system, LC system, or subject categories.. though I thought briefly about it. The information is already there associated with the book info, and is therefore already searchable and sortable. Why do I need to do work that has already been done?

13E59F
May 3, 2009, 6:42 am

The reason I did it was to make it more easily searchable for others.

14sjmccreary
May 3, 2009, 1:43 pm

I tag my dewey books as "nonfiction" - I haven't gotten into the the 800's literature (fiction) sections yet, though. But I'd be willing to go back and add tags to the Dewey books if there is a "preferred" format.

15E59F
May 3, 2009, 6:28 pm

If you use the same format for Dewey tags as either fleela (e.g., "DD942") or AnnaClaire (e.g., "@ 942") it will provide the most benefit in terms of searchability. I used AnnaClaire's format for that reason.

16sjmccreary
May 3, 2009, 10:51 pm

Well, fleela's "DDxxx" is more intuitive to me, but if AnnaClaire's "@ xxx" is more widely preferred, then I will use it. I don't have so many books in my Dewey list yet that this will be hard to do.

17tututhefirst
May 3, 2009, 11:23 pm

I'm still not sure I'm going to do anything other than complete the Dewey field in the edit book ...I just don't tend to search by other peoples tags....I consider them tooo tooo tooo quirky and individual. I really don't want to use a system that doesn't make sense to me, and the "@" thingies make no sense to me. Having 1000 different tags for each number when there's already a field to store that info, just doesn't cut it for me.

So, sorry fellow challengees, my tag is DDC for the DDC and those will all have the Dewey field column available, but that's as far as I wish to go.

18SqueakyChu
May 4, 2009, 12:07 am

I've decided not to use Dewey tags. I'd rather keep my tags as items that are more meaningful to LT as a whole.

19_Zoe_
Edited: May 4, 2009, 9:46 am

I'm not using Dewey tags either, since I don't find them useful within my catalogue. I do think it's a good idea and helpful to others, though. But I'm hoping Tim will eventually be persuaded to implement a site-wide Dewey search--he seemed to like the idea last time he considered it, but started to do something a bit too elaborate and seems to have given up.

20SqueakyChu
May 4, 2009, 9:43 am

Yeah. Periodically, we'll just have to remind Tim. Let's wait until Collections is released and the bugs are worked out of that. Then we can issue gentle reminders from time to time.

In the meantime, just looking through the threads of other members is a simple way to find suggestions. At least the books are in numerical order. :)

21E59F
May 4, 2009, 10:11 am

Another way to do it would be a group wiki page that links to the tag pages for each Dewey tag. At present it would be very underpopulated, but aggregating the links to pages like
http://www.librarything.com/tag/@%20942
might be useful for this group if enough people tag them, so that the more popular books float to the top.

22antisyzygy
May 4, 2009, 10:34 am

I've just found this discussion and am really interested in its potential. I've added te DDC number to my tags as a matter of course (partly as insurance, who knows waht system I might export my data to) and also to cover those scenarios when a work warrants > 1 class number. The great thing about class numbers is that they are language-independent, so we're not reliant on tag combiners to link together England, England & Wales, Sasuinn, Angleterre etc.
There's real opportunities to provide crosswalks between different calssification schemas if enough people can get involved.

Scurries off to add @ to >2000 DDC numbers

23E59F
Sep 2, 2009, 12:56 am

So, some months later I've finally made a wiki page that consists of a big mass of links to the tag pages for "@ 942" style Dewey tags.
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/User:E59F/DDCtags

There are four of us using these tags at this point, so it has a reasonable range to work from, but of course many of the 1000 tag pages are still empty - a lot more than just the several dozen numbers that aren't in use. Still, it may be useful for people looking for a particular Dewey number to see if any of us have tagged a book with it.

What I wish is that there were a way to show a tag page for "or" combinations, so that for example it could show results for any book with tag="@ 942" OR tag="DD942". One could also use that to group results, for example to get results for any "@ 94*" tag. If only the site search allowed the same syntax as the catalogue search, it could be done with a search query, but for now I don't see a way of doing this.

24fundevogel
Sep 3, 2009, 12:43 am

I tagged a chunk of my library according to your system, but the books don't show up in your wiki. I think this might be an issue with librarything rather than your page. For instance if I search "@ 171" I get this page (the same one the your wiki would take me to) saying that the tag has not been used, though if you click the "1" next to my name it will take you to the book I tagged.

25E59F
Sep 3, 2009, 1:16 am

Did you just recently add them? I think the tag pages are partly cached, so it may take a while for them to show up.

26fundevogel
Sep 3, 2009, 2:42 am

yesterday, so you're probably right about the caching.

27carlym
Sep 7, 2009, 11:34 am

I'm starting to tag my books with the "@ ###" system.

28E59F
Sep 13, 2009, 12:53 am

>27 carlym::
That's great, yours are filling out some of the areas where there wasn't much before.

29carlym
Sep 13, 2009, 9:03 am

The wiki page is nice. I'm thinking of starting to use the "wishlist" collection to add books off my paper list of Dewey books that I've noted as possibilities for various categories but that I haven't bought yet.

30amckie
Sep 18, 2009, 3:08 pm

I keep meaning to do this and then forget! I am on a long business trip though and stuck in small-town Georgia over the weekend... this might be something to occupy my time! (Though, and this is the reason I haven't done this yet, I would prefer to go by the number in my book then the number listed either here on LT or somewhere else!)

What has everyone else been doing? Relying on the LT number, a number found somewhere else, or strictly what is in the book?

31amckie
Sep 18, 2009, 3:17 pm

And are people tagging the super common 823, 813, etc or skipping them?

32E59F
Sep 18, 2009, 4:42 pm

I added most of my books using the Library of Congress, and for those the number in the book is generally the same as what's in LT. If the source I added from didn't have one, I used what was in the book, and if it wasn't there, I looked it up on WorldCat - and left it blank if I didn't find one anywhere.

I skipped 813 and 823, mainly because I figured nobody really needed those, but other people have tagged them.

33fundevogel
Sep 20, 2009, 4:56 pm

I'm deleting my dewey tags because they never showed up in the wiki page E59F made and they didn't serve me any function outside of that particular enterprise.

34_Zoe_
Oct 26, 2009, 11:06 pm

>33 fundevogel: fundevogel, I just saw your name on one of the tag pages, though with zero tags; I wonder whether it just took a very long time to update?

I'm really behind on this whole concept. How is the wiki page working out?

35fundevogel
Oct 26, 2009, 11:25 pm

I don't think so. That's exactly what it was like when I did have things tagged. It found my name but not my tags.

36_Zoe_
Oct 26, 2009, 11:25 pm

Weird. Did anyone report this in Bug Collectors?

37fundevogel
Oct 26, 2009, 11:27 pm

I didn't know there was such a thing.

38_Zoe_
Oct 26, 2009, 11:29 pm

There's not always a quick response, but it exists.

39E59F
Oct 26, 2009, 11:51 pm

Having watched it for some time, my impression is that it takes a couple of weeks for books to make it into the "Most often tagged" list. This is confusing, because your own books never appear in the "Recently tagged" list (that's apparently a feature rather than a bug), so for a couple of weeks anything you've tagged appears to be absent from the tag page apart from the number after your user name.

But if fundevogel is still on a tag page after removing that tag a month ago, that sounds like a bug!