Archive Testing, 1... 2... 3...

[icarus]

An Archive Of Our Own is in testing. To help facilitate this, I am slowly uploading fics there and assiduously providing feedback on what works, what doesn't. Hopefully my suggestions are helpful and not too redundant.

Please let the archive know if you note any problems:

Tanlines & Dogtags

First Signs Of Magic: Hermione Granger

A Moment Of Sin

My question for you is on tagging in the An Archive Of Our Own. Yes, it sorts by tags like delicious.

What would you like to see in tags so you can find what you want to read? What makes a good tag? How general should I be? How specific? How much should I customize tags to the content of the story? Is there such thing as "over-tagging"?

For example, for Tanlines & Dogtags I have the tags:

* drama
* pre-slash
* ust
* mild angst
* photography
* art

While for A Moment Of Sin I only used the tag:

* prostitution

I realized, huh, I'm not sure how to do this.

This is in your interest. If I tag badly, it will make it difficult for you to find what you want. It also helps me, so thank you all very much in advance.


ETA: Based on your suggestions, here's what I have for tags: http://archiveofourown.org/en/users/Icarus/profile

Length: shortfic, medium length, longfic, novel length

Character: All prominent characters are listed, even if they're not the main pairing.

Time: season, pre-OotP, where relevant.

Genre: humor, angst, romance, darkfic, drama, crack!fic, au, bdsm, pwp

Pairing generalities: rairpair, crossgen, chan

Story themes to help people beeline their searches: prostitution, polyjuice, photography, gay bar, gun kink, wingfic, crossdressing, non-con, exhibitionism, skinny dipping, etc.

Series name: Primer to the Dark Arts, Beg Me For It, Skinny Dipping, and First Signs of Magic series names (and future series names).

It's clear to me that your ability to filter and find stories will depend upon successful tagging by the authors.

Comments

Just Fantasizing

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

[Note that I've never been to the AAOOO site and am just being general here about mechanics and such.]

What'd be useful would be to be able to use tags (and any other delimiters) to narrow a search.

So suppose I'm in the mood for something funny. I go in and enter "humor" in the SEARCH box. I get 16,549 fics which have the "humor" tag. Whoa.

I feel like a short story, so I enter "short" in the box and now I'm down to 13,208 stories -- all of which are tagged "short" or have fewer than 5K words (or whatever limit the maintainers decide on).

That's still too many so now I'll enter "RPS." Now we're down to 3297 stories. Much better, but still too many.

Next I enter "slash." Maybe this isn't actually a tag -- it's a hardcoded field of the story database and when you upload a story you're required to choose one or more of "slash," "femslash," "het" or "gen." Some stories have multiples so you can choose multiples, but every story has to have at least one of these designators. The search function still recognizes those terms and uses them in my sort exactly the same way it uses tags. Now I'm down to 2865 stories, 'cause most RPS is slash.

After all this work, I'm willing to face the fact that a more general search is probably going to give me too much of what I like. I decide I want to jump off from here and search for a number of characters, but not necessarily all at once. I hit the SAVE option and the collection of search terms I've entered so far is saved to my account; I can come back at any time and choose this search in a pull-down menu and end up right back here, with a list of stories (although six months from now there'll probably be 4123 results) which I can either refine further with more search words (without messing up this saved search -- I'd have to explicitly delete it out of my SAVE list to get rid of it) or which I can just browse through and start clicking on stories.

Now that I have this saved, I enter "Harry Sinclair" and get a nice, relatively manageable list of 84 funny, short, RPS slash stories about Harry Sinclair. I scroll down to find something to read. But oops! I find that this list contains a lot of stories where Harry appears; he doesn't even have any lines in some of them.

I hit the BACK button next to the search box and it takes me back up to my previous search result. (I could also have chosen that from my pull-down list, since I saved it, but the BACK button is faster. It only works for my current search, though, so if I do this again next week I'll have to use the pull-down to get back to this search result.)

This time I enter "Main:Harry Sinclair" and I get an even more manageable list of 8 funny, short, RPS slash stories where Harry is one of the main characters. Maybe a bit more manageable than I was hoping for [cough] but that's not the archive's problem. [wry smile]

I'd love to have an archive that worked like this. I hadn't thought of it before, though, in so many words, until you asked your question and I read through the comments and it sort of came to me. :)

Angie

Re: Just Fantasizing

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Appears you're not alone in this. *points down the comment list*