Tagging

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[edit] What are tags?

The short answer: Tags are a simple way to categorize books according to how you think of them, not how some official librarian does. Thus one person will tag the The DaVinci Code "novels" while another tags it "trashy, religion, mary," and still another only "summer home." Tags are particularly useful for sorting and searching by those concepts—i.e., when you need a list of all your novels or all the books at the summer home.

See the longer answer on the Concepts page.

[edit] How do I tag?

Enter tags (they can be single words or phrases) in the tag box, separated by commas. Non-alphanumeric characters (such as "&", "+", and "-") are allowed in tags, but some of them may cause strange behavior in some contexts, especially if they're the first or last character in a tag or adjacent to a space. If you're encountering problems with a tag that includes one of these characters, try editing it to remove the special character.

[edit] How do I combine tags?

See the Tag Combining page for more info.

[edit] How do I tag several books at once?

Use Power Edit -- see more details at http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=16422

[edit] How do I change a tag on multiple books?

If you want to change all occurrences of a tag to something else (say you started tagging things "non-fiction" but wanted to change it to "nonfiction"), that can be accomplished using Power Edit.

• First, pull of a list of books using the old tag by clicking on it in catalog view.
• Switch into Power Edit mode by clicking the P/E button on your catalog's toolbar
• Select all books, and ADD the new tag.
• Make sure all books are still selected, THEN delete the old tag. It's important to do these two steps in order—if you delete the old tag first, your selected list of books will disappear and you will have to go through your entire catalog to re-select the appropriate books.

[edit] Tag limitations

• Tags can not contain commas
• Limit tags to 30 characters

[edit] Tag watch

You can "watch" particular tags to get lists of books which were recently tagged with your watched tags.

[edit] More information

You can view your tags page at

• Tag management page: http://www.librarything.com/catalog_tags.php?
• Original view: http://www.librarything.com/tags.php?view=username