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

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

I keep waiting for someone, somewhere, to institute Boolean tag searches. I.e.,

harrypotter and ((slash and prostitution) or rentboy) and crossdressing and not hagrid

But I'm pretty sure that's computationally expensive.

[fer-de-lance.livejournal.com]

YES.

Because when I'm looking for a fic I read six months ago, and I remember that it was Harry/Snape and was a prostitute AU, without Draco, I don't want to have to search through 15,000 AUs or 10,000 AUs or 8,000 Snape/Harry fics (a third of which also have Harry/Draco or Snape/Draco) trying to find the one I want; I want to be able to put everything I remember into my searching, to narrow the results as much as possible.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

What they have currently is you can go to the Fandoms page: http://archiveofourown.org/en/media

And from there pick Harry Potter: http://archiveofourown.org/en/fandoms/183/works

Then from there you can filter the tags on the right-hand side. I missed that before.

The trick is, the author has to have tagged their fic "prostitution" for you to find it. This system, it's really up to the author to tag their fics well.

[fer-de-lance.livejournal.com]

Ah, that does help tremendously -- I didn't realise one could search within the fandom page.

It seems kind of... shaky? to me to leave tagging up to the authors; as you mentioned, there's no guarantee that they'll stick anything on there except "drama" and "slash". Do they have a list of all the available tags, like LJ does? Could it be part of the upload process -- the last step being a "Tag This Story" page with the direction, Choose all that apply?

It's going to be fascinating to see the archive kick off and start evolving! I can hardly wait till Tuesday when I'll have time to go and really poke around in it. :D

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I have no idea, but yes, I imagine so. Or else why wouldn't everyone use Boolean tag searches?