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 tag – a lot. One of the things I love about LibraryThing is that I can tag my books any way I want, in ways that are meaningful to me. I tag them by genre, sometimes by author or character (I can easily see what percentage of my mystery collection is made up of Nero Wolfe novels). I am also using my tags to track what I’ve read so far this year – I have tags for Read in 2008 and Read in 2007. Because of that, I have added some library books to my library, and they are all tagged KFL (Kent Free Library).

Some on-line friends of mine have been pretty critical of LT’s tagging feature; not surprisingly, they are all librarians and they want a very strict tagging structure. They really don’t like seeing tags like book club pick, signed by the author and hated it in my library. My response has always been that there are thousands of libraries that all use a uniform tagging system. My tagging a book hot vampires is not going to bring about the end of the Dewey Decimal system. I would also argue that there is a definite difference between vampires and hot vampires, so it’s worthy of its own tag. Besides, if I looked in someone’s library and saw a tag like hot vampires, I am definitely going to check that book out – and probably go back to my own books and do a little retagging! What a great way to make fun connections!

My top 5 tags are: mystery (120), unread (117), fiction (94), horror (48), Nero Wolfe (47). What do they say about me? I have some work to do! I have a lot of books to be read and I know I have more fiction than that!