We are a group of students at the University of Washington’s Master of Library and Information Science program. This is our capstone project for the program. We were inspired by the way works are organized on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a digital archive for individuals to post fan fiction and original works to share with others. AO3 uses a unique combination of author-created tags to catalog their own works and volunteer tag wranglers who work behind-the-scenes to create relationships between these user tags, allowing authors to use their own language to describe their works while maintaining an archive that is fully searchable and filterable by users.
In addition, the language used to describe and catalog fiction is severely lacking. Because of this, we decided to develop our own vocabulary to provide more robust descriptions of fiction in online library catalogs. We created taxonomies to describe a book’s genre, characters, tropes, setting, ending, and reading appeal, as well as our own rating systems for violence, language, and sexual content and a separate taxonomy for content warnings.
Our intent with this project is to combine our vocabulary with user tagging, the goal being a highly descriptive online catalog of fiction using user-submitted language curated behind the scenes by library workers or volunteers in order to make these tags searchable. That’s where you come in. We want you to tag books you’ve read with as little or as much detail as you want, in your own words. We’ve started the vocabulary, and now we want you to use it, and to build on it. Now that you’re here, you can get started by creating an account and tagging your own reads. We’ve created instructions for adding books and the tagging process, and creating tags if you aren’t finding what you want. If you’re interested you can learn more about our project. You can also browse through the vocabulary at your leisure, or the books that have already been tagged.
Thank you so much for your time and participation. We’re excited to see how you use these tags and to hear any feedback you may have.
Have fun!