Search TinyCat or LibraryThing

Is a search in TinyCat or LibraryThing supposed to look at what's in the description field of a book?

>1 CFBC: What do you mean by description field? If book summary, then no. It only searches fields in your actual catalogue. If you go to advanced search you can see all fields that can be searched

>2 SandraArdnas: I guess it is summary but it is shown under "Library Description" when I select the "Descriptions" link. The Advanced Search has an option of "Most Fields" which now I'm guessing means most of those fields that are listed under the "any field" tab. Thanks.

When you use the site wide search without any qualifiers, it searches all fields that might contain that word or phrase. So yes, it will look at book descriptions, reviews, tags, titles, authors, etc.

If you want it to just search the title, you'll want to add a delimiter like Title: to make sure it only grabs the titles.

If you search your personal library, there is a drop down to use for limiting that search.

>3 CFBC: 'Most Fields' is the default, so if you just do a regular search it will search in those. When you open advanced search it lists all the individual fields to pick - title,author, tags, review, comments, publication, source, publication date, subject, ISBN. Those are the things you can search for within your catalogue, so those can be searched in TinyCat. Site search is different, but it's not available from TinyCat, just LT.

>4 gilroy: For some reason, when I do a search in either the "Your books" section of LibraryThing or just an overall search in TinyCat the results do not show what is in the description field. For example, if I search for "writing" I don't get the book about writing titled "Letter & Life" even though the first word in it's description is "writing."

But the description field is not part of your book record.

>7 MarthaJeanne: I agree, but it is slightly annoying that you can't search for it.

Another thing I noticed is that I get to do a
Genre search:All Topics
on my TinyCat catalogue.
Is there any way to locate those books that haven't got a genre?
i.e. an item like this one: https://www.librarycat.org/lib/bnielsen/item/133953682

The description field is by far the most frustrating part of TinyCat/LibraryThing. Individual TinyCat libraries have very little control over it (you can vote the description up or down), and it's either on for every book or off for all books. And on top of that it's not searchable. Can't add subjects either even in your own collection. We are faced with having to edit the entire library catalog by creating a description for each book and placing that in the item contents field so that when users search our TinyCat that have a better chance of finding a subject they are looking for. Am I missing something?

>9 CFBC: I'd add subjects as tags. Even if you get subject headings from your source, it is useful because in TinyCat users can filter the search results further by tags. Say you search for children's literature, get a hundred results and then filter just those that include 'bears' tag. Tags are far more useful for searching the catalogue then descriptions anyway since the latter more often than not include a lot of fluff, whereas tags are literally what you want to be able to search and group and pull together. Subject Headings from library sources are searchable, but they are not one of the facets enabling you to narrow down the search. TinyCat search results can be faceted by format, collection, tags, genre, language and original language.

It may not even be a deliberate thing, not searching descriptions. They are a fairly new feature, and it may just not have occurred to anyone to add it into the search.

>11 MarthaJeanne: I also wonder where the genre information comes from. :-)

>12 bnielsen: They made algorithms for each one, combining DDC. LC classification, tags and some other stuff I don't remember. Some are better than others. I keep turning off General Non-Fiction on almost every book I own. If it's non-fiction at all, it slaps General Non-Fiction on it. Collected Works of CG Jung, history textbook, academic philosophy, you name it, it's General Non-Fiction :)

>10 SandraArdnas: Thank you SandraArdnas for you suggestions. Kristi at LibraryThing also had recommended tags to me some time ago, but for some reason that just didn't sink in with me at the time. Your explanation helped and may be my best solution. My concern with descriptions goes beyond searching, though, since I want our library patrons to be able to read the description of a book so they could better determine if that title would be of interest to them. Too often the descriptions are more marketing than enlightening. I wish we could at least turn descriptions off for individual books, which I have recommended to Kristi. But that decision is not up to her. She also mentioned using LibraryThing's members' book descriptions field (shown on the descriptions page). That field is shared and editable by all members as a group, though it is not included on TinyCat pages.

>14 CFBC: Yes, descriptions are often a long block of text with one meaningful sentence in it. Unless there are multiple, with some decent ones, we're stuck with those. I don't even bother reading if it has paragraphs of raving how awesome it is to find that bit what it is actually about ;) They come from Bowker, perhaps we should flood them with requests for meaningful and concise book descriptions :)