Medieval Bookworm

Today’s question is about tags- do you tag? How do you tag? How do you feel about tagging- do you think it would be better to have standardized tags, like libraries have standardized subject headings, or do you like the individualized nature of tagging? What are your top 5 tags and what do they say about your collection or your reading habits?

I like tags. I use them for myself, not really for the benefit of anyone else – I tag things like genre, subject, location, when I read the book, if I haven’t read it yet, and so on. I particularly like being able to sort my library by said tags, because I wouldn’t normally see all those books put together on the shelves, since I typically shelve in alphabetical order. I do sometimes tag a bit haphazardly. I have a tag “England” which is meant to be all books set in England, but I’m not always good about applying that and other location tags, for example. I like them, but I don’t generally have a long string of tags attached to each book, just 2 or 3.

I don’t think that standardized tags are necessary. When you click on a book, you can see the most common tags, which generally eliminates rare ones that aren’t useful to the wider population. I think user-generated tags are much more interesting than a bunch of standard ones.

As for my most common tags, they are fantasy (210), historical romance (178), historical fiction (156), england (140), and school (136). I do read a lot of fantasy and historical fiction. I think the historical fiction tag has probably experienced the most growth lately. The historical romance is a throwback to high school. England is basically my favorite country, and I have history and historical fiction mostly from there, so its presence in the top 5 is not unexpected. Lastly, the school tag is not surprising, as I’ve acquired plenty of books through classes, especially English classes.

How many books do you have cataloged in your LibraryThing account? How do you decide what to include- everything you have, everything you’ve read- and are there things you leave off?

I’ve got 1010 books in my LT account right now, with one on the way from Amazon.  I have too many books for the room I still live in in my parents’ house.  Luckily I am getting married and moving out next year, so I should be able to spread them out once I have my own place.  Up until very recently, I only included books I physically owned.  Then I decided that eventually LT was going to come out with a collections feature, so I added borrowed books as well.  There are so few of them that it’s not worth having another account for them, honestly.  I also keep books I’ve given away to preserve ratings and recommendations, but there are only a few of those as well.  I do not include wishlist books that I haven’t read, I have a separate account for those.  So basically the books in my library are those that I have read and those that I own.