Library Cataloguing
Some of you may have wondered from time to time why there are five tags on each of your entries. I did write a very brief explanation back when we started the group, but I thought I'd give a more in depth run through of why I catalogue the way I do.
Some of my non-LJ friends commented to me once that the reason they don't like LJ is because fic gets lost in the piles and piles of entries that go into communities and personal LJs never to be accessed again without knowing things like date of posting. I have also been in LJ communities where I have posted fic and while the reading is good on day-of-post and a few days after, the story eventually gets lost in the archive of time. Who wants to wade through a very busy LJ archive to look for one fic?
So when I set this one up, I thought I'd do it in a way so that everything was easily accessible. I'm a library worker, I'm supposedly trained to organise information, so why not?
Hence the cataloguing.
Each entry is catalogued twice. Once by tagging with five tags, and also by assigning it to memories.
The five tags and the Catalogue
Each entry has five tags - fandom/universe, character/muse, author/journal, challenge and format. I tried to look at this from the reader's point of view. I honestly don't know if we have any readers, but if we do, they should be able to access any entry they want.
Readers often come by fandom. Joe Bloggs only wants to read Firefly fic. So he goes to the catalogue and pulls up all the Firefly fic.
But say he only likes fics with River as the focus? He can go back to the catalogue and access just those fics with the River Tam tag.
However, the
libraryofwinds allows multiple versions of any character in any fandom. What if Joe only likes one of those versions? The River tag will bring up all the River entries regardless of who wrote them. If Joe then notes which journal the River he prefers belongs to, he can again go back to the catalogue and select that journal from the list of Author/Journals and read all the entries by that person to his heart's content. (eg. mals_albatross or aionmadness)
The challenge number tag allows both readers and writers to compare the various different interpretations of the challenges across fandoms.
The format tag simply denotes whether the entry is 'fic' (written from a personal journal) or 'muse (written from a muse journal) or if it contains icon art. Muse introductions also come under this tag....hmm, come to thing of it I should move 'introduction' to the challenge list - it belongs there by definition (sorry, thinking out loud).
A quick note on Original work tags - we have quite a few original fic writers in our community and from the very beginning I saw a problem with cataloguing these fics. I could simply slap them all into one big heading of 'Original'. But what if a reader liked a particular character or universe? I found it necessary to divide 'original' into universes as advised by the authors themselves (eg. original - two planets) to enable readers to have all the fic from one universe easily accessible and to allow multiple characters from the one universe to be kept together. Basically it brings all the original fics in line with the fandom fics for ease of access.
All the tags can be accessed by the Catalogue page.
Memories (accessed via the 'Answers' link in the Links List towards the top of the community)
I have never been entralled by the memories feature of LJ, it can be clunky at times and also very time consuming cataloging-wise, so I almost didn't use it since tags were so versatile. However, I did end up archiving each fic by challenge and fandom, and you might ask why did I bother? It duplicates the tags.
Two reasons.
Memories gives the reader who is more familiar with that system the chance to access fic by fandom, then title and author, in one big list.
And also I get easy statistics on how many responses were made to each of the challenges, so when I go to post the next challenge, I know what types of words I've used before and which ones proved popular.
In summary, the community is basically an archive, a library of fic within Live Journal, where you should be able to access any entry you ever made, and so should everyone else.
The mechanics of cataloguing
I check every entry that gets posted. Members are welcome to tag their own entries with the tags provided and save me some time :D New members and new challenge tags can't be used until I put the tag in the list. I will still check those tags applied and alter if necessary.
Once tagged, I will assign the post to memories using the fic title and the author for the entry heading. If the fic has no title, it will default to the challenge word. I use the format date: 'Title of Fic' by Author (and if author is a muse, 'muse' is in brackets after the author).
If there is a post by a new member, I will also update the catalogue page to reflect that. The catalogue page only contains references to members who have posted to the community.
And that is pretty much it :D Any questions/concerns? (Other than the ones involving my sanity :D)
Some of my non-LJ friends commented to me once that the reason they don't like LJ is because fic gets lost in the piles and piles of entries that go into communities and personal LJs never to be accessed again without knowing things like date of posting. I have also been in LJ communities where I have posted fic and while the reading is good on day-of-post and a few days after, the story eventually gets lost in the archive of time. Who wants to wade through a very busy LJ archive to look for one fic?
So when I set this one up, I thought I'd do it in a way so that everything was easily accessible. I'm a library worker, I'm supposedly trained to organise information, so why not?
Hence the cataloguing.
Each entry is catalogued twice. Once by tagging with five tags, and also by assigning it to memories.
The five tags and the Catalogue
Each entry has five tags - fandom/universe, character/muse, author/journal, challenge and format. I tried to look at this from the reader's point of view. I honestly don't know if we have any readers, but if we do, they should be able to access any entry they want.
Readers often come by fandom. Joe Bloggs only wants to read Firefly fic. So he goes to the catalogue and pulls up all the Firefly fic.
But say he only likes fics with River as the focus? He can go back to the catalogue and access just those fics with the River Tam tag.
However, the
libraryofwinds allows multiple versions of any character in any fandom. What if Joe only likes one of those versions? The River tag will bring up all the River entries regardless of who wrote them. If Joe then notes which journal the River he prefers belongs to, he can again go back to the catalogue and select that journal from the list of Author/Journals and read all the entries by that person to his heart's content. (eg. mals_albatross or aionmadness)The challenge number tag allows both readers and writers to compare the various different interpretations of the challenges across fandoms.
The format tag simply denotes whether the entry is 'fic' (written from a personal journal) or 'muse (written from a muse journal) or if it contains icon art. Muse introductions also come under this tag....hmm, come to thing of it I should move 'introduction' to the challenge list - it belongs there by definition (sorry, thinking out loud).
A quick note on Original work tags - we have quite a few original fic writers in our community and from the very beginning I saw a problem with cataloguing these fics. I could simply slap them all into one big heading of 'Original'. But what if a reader liked a particular character or universe? I found it necessary to divide 'original' into universes as advised by the authors themselves (eg. original - two planets) to enable readers to have all the fic from one universe easily accessible and to allow multiple characters from the one universe to be kept together. Basically it brings all the original fics in line with the fandom fics for ease of access.
All the tags can be accessed by the Catalogue page.
Memories (accessed via the 'Answers' link in the Links List towards the top of the community)
I have never been entralled by the memories feature of LJ, it can be clunky at times and also very time consuming cataloging-wise, so I almost didn't use it since tags were so versatile. However, I did end up archiving each fic by challenge and fandom, and you might ask why did I bother? It duplicates the tags.
Two reasons.
Memories gives the reader who is more familiar with that system the chance to access fic by fandom, then title and author, in one big list.
And also I get easy statistics on how many responses were made to each of the challenges, so when I go to post the next challenge, I know what types of words I've used before and which ones proved popular.
In summary, the community is basically an archive, a library of fic within Live Journal, where you should be able to access any entry you ever made, and so should everyone else.
The mechanics of cataloguing
I check every entry that gets posted. Members are welcome to tag their own entries with the tags provided and save me some time :D New members and new challenge tags can't be used until I put the tag in the list. I will still check those tags applied and alter if necessary.
Once tagged, I will assign the post to memories using the fic title and the author for the entry heading. If the fic has no title, it will default to the challenge word. I use the format date: 'Title of Fic' by Author (and if author is a muse, 'muse' is in brackets after the author).
If there is a post by a new member, I will also update the catalogue page to reflect that. The catalogue page only contains references to members who have posted to the community.
And that is pretty much it :D Any questions/concerns? (Other than the ones involving my sanity :D)