![]() ![]() ![]() Either pick items that are in a similar large category (different fiction books, different non-fiction books, writing research books, etc.) or you can try a mix of all your categories. Somewhere between 20 and 40 is a good starting number: you can work through that fairly quickly without it feeling overwhelming, but there’s enough variation you’ll start seeing places your initial ideas may work well or not. You’ll often learn a lot about what you care about after you’ve done a few dozen items. It can be really helpful to start with a small but manageable set of items and see how that goes. Here are a few tips for beginning to build a controlled vocabulary for your collection, if you want to be able to use your tags to find all the material on a topic. If you use a variety of words to mean the same thing, you’ll lose a lot of power to search and gather similar items. But if they’re not, you might want to think about tidying this up. Now, these may actually be four distinct categories for you! If they are, there’s no reason they shouldn’t have four distinct labels. The downside of an open-ended system is that you can end up with things like (Tagging people’s names or handles is a sort of variant method: it connects pieces of information together by whatever that thing is.) A lot of us are now used to tagging our things in some way, whether that’s blog posts, social media posts or something else. This means that you use a set list of terms to organise what you have.Ĭontrolled vocabularies are often contrasted to folksonomies, which are things like open-ended tagging. However, there’s a concept you may want to consider, which is the idea of the controlled vocabulary. These are almost always going to be way more complicated than you want for a personal collection. Libraries use established subject headings (sometimes from the Library of Congress, sometimes from other established lists. The author is also usually pretty obvious, but again can have some complications (some systems deal with multiple authors a lot more elegantly than others.) Corporate authors, the term for an organisation being the author, can also be complicated.īut you can usually look these up, and use what the booksellers or libraries are using. But we can usually figure out a title most of the time. Sometimes series titles look like book titles or vice versa. Sometimes you have a subtitle, sometimes you have something that feels a little weird. ![]() Titles are usually the easiest to sort out. Normally, these are author, title, and some sort of subject categorisation. You want to think about points of entry for finding works. (I use LibraryThing, about which more in future articles.) If you use software, they’ll probably ask you for certain pieces of information, or have a way to search for it. Some of this will depend on how you’re keeping track of what you have. Some will make more sense for you intuitively than others, probably. Some of them scale better than others (or work better for large, nuanced collections). Make an added entry under the medium or a person recording the communication.”)įundamentally, though, it’s about providing ways to get access to information about what your library has. For the curious, it’s point 21.26 and says “Enter a work that is presented as a communication from a spirit under the heading for the spirit. (My favourite of these, from the system in use when I was in grad school, the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd edition, was that there’s a method for cataloguing material gained through spiritual mediumship. At its most formal, cataloguing has a lot of little tiny minute details and special cases. Most library schools require librarians to take courses in cataloguing, and many librarians find it really frustrating. (The quote, of course, is from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and it’s here because it’s a thing that often pops into my head when I start thinking about lists of subjects.) Which is to say, now that we’ve got a bunch of items, how do we keep track of them? This article is an introduction to basic cataloging principles. ![]()
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