Are there any plans to add the ability to edit subjects?

I have had to manually enter a lot of independently published books, many of which don't even have ISBNs, and I've been lazy where possible when Amazon has book information on it. Since no libraries I've queried have these books, my entries don't have any subject information in them.

I've been defaulting to adding BISAC subject headings as tags, but this kinda makes the tags feature less useful overall since it's populated with both regular tags and subject heading tags.

I've even considered exporting all my books as MARC records, manually adding subject headings to the records, and then re-importing MARC records to see if that adds the subject headings—but that just feels like a Sisyphusian task.

Are there any plans to add editing subjects as a feature to LibraryThing? or am I going to have to stick with janky tags or miserably editing MARC records?

>1 bibsteve: I think there's zero since it's controlled vocabulary

>1 bibsteve: Unfortunately, unless the book is found in an existing library source catalog, there are no subjects and TPTB have said the subject field will remain locked.

Also of note, exporting records, repairing your file, and then importing would not update any records. It would create new records.

>3 gilroy: Unfortunately, unless the book is found in an existing library source catalog, there are no subjects and TPTB have said the subject field will remain locked.

It's worth noting, however, that there are fields that the user has absolute control over, including tags, comments, and private comments. >1 bibsteve: expressed a dislike of tags (I'm not sure why), but there is nothing to prevent using one or another of these fields for a rigid classification. Or for a semi-rigid (e.g. having a fixed list of standard entities, like the Genres field, while allowing free-form entities as well).

Also note that some of the Subject entries can be troublesome because of character set conversions gone wrong. So it would be nice to sanitize Subjects even just being able to delete the field from your own books would be nice.

>4 waltzmn: expressed a dislike of tags (I'm not sure why)

It's not that I don't like tags, it's that the tags get polluted with things like "COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / Fantasy / Dragons & Mythical Creatures, fantasy, comics, dragons" which makes the field harder to manage. Ideally I'd like tags to be single words or phrases, and subjects to be a full hierarchy, if that makes sense.

>6 bibsteve:

My tags aren't "polluted" like that. There's no reason yours should be if you are averse to such tags. Displayed in the catalog (My books), you should only see your own tagging, not the full crowdsourced tagging of the work.

>6 bibsteve: If you mean that as one example of a subject heading, I'd just divided it into 3 tags: comics and graphic novels, fantasy, dragons and mythical creatures. (Actually, I'd split the comics and graphic novels into different tags since they are distinct categories with not much overlap, but the point remains you make tags distinct categories, rather than one long hierarchy. You can search for multiple tags, so there's no downside to splitting this long nested subject heading into several different tags)

>7 paradoxosalpha: Tag clouds can be quite funny to explore.

>7 paradoxosalpha: I don't mean to imply that multiple tags pollute the field. I mean that mixing tags as they're intended with the long BISAC subject headings makes the field more unwieldy. I'd much rather use the tags fields like you do.

Ultimately, what I think I want to do is have a few BISAC subject headings to choose from for each of my books and order them on my shelf by BISAC code instead of LCC or DDC, which don't separate fiction by genre for individual authors, but I'm not yet ready to commit to a single BISAC classification for each book yet. I want to wait to see an overall picture of my library before I make commitments there.

>8 SandraArdnas: Thank you for your suggestion. I think that's what I'll end up doing after I finish this BISAC categroy project. It looks like I can edit tag names, and if I add commas to the new name field it'll split the tag into multiple tags. I'm gonna do that to get everything tagged uniformly at once after I have more BISAC headings assigned.

>9 bnielsen: I'd really like to use tag clouds, but BISAC subject headings are just too long for the cloud to look aesthetically pleasing. Once I finish this BISAC project of mine split up the tags as recommended, I'll be much happier with how my tag clouds turn out.

Thank you all for your feedback. I sincerely appreciate it. I'm sorry I didn't respond to you all quicker. It doesn't look like talk replies result in notifications, so I had to remember to check back in on the thread to see if anyone's replied.

Please let me know if you have any more suggestions 🙂!