50books_poc | So, Let's Talk About Tags

So many of you know that we've been butting up against LJ's tag-limit for a while now (1000 tags for a free community), and that the long-term tag-management plan is to port all the author tags over to the 50books_PoC Delicious account. (That's the first step. After that's done, we'll try to rope the race/ethnicity/nationality/geography tags into some sort of order. But for this phase of the project, I'm just talking about author tags.)

The rest of this post is divided into two parts:

How should I tag my posts?
Can I volunteer to help move the author tags to delicious?

Part the first: How should I tag my posts?

Don't bother with the author / editor / translator tags -- we're just going to be deleting them all out anyway, as we move them over to delicious. Do make it clear in the post what the author's name is.
Please copy your proposed race/ethnicity/nationality/geography/whatever tags into the body of the post, at the very end, something like I've done here. If you don't know that level of detail, that's fine. However, there is often stuff that's obvious to you, the reader of the book, that is not obvious to us, the maintainers of the tags, which is why it's nice if you include that info in an easy-to-find-spot in the post. Sorting out the race/ethnicity/nationality/geography tags later on will be easier for us if we're not having to research all these authors.

The other reason that I want you putting this info into the post is because some of it is too granular to live on LJ's tag system -- we've only got a thousand tags at our disposal here. At the moment, when someone uses tags that are just too finely-divided for LJ (like what city or state the book is set in, or the narrow subject matter), we're having to delete them out again because there isn't space to go that fine. Unfortunately, when we delete them out, if that info isn't in the post, too, it's gone forever. So please duplicate your tags at the end of the post.
Do not use the "(delicious)" tag -- that's for the volunteer-team-to-be only. We're using that tag to keep track of where we are as we're cataloging posts over on delicious.

...and there are probably other questions you have, but which I didn't think to answer. Let me know.

Part the second: Can I volunteer to help move the tags to delicious?

Yes, please! Please, please, yes!

Some of you said a while back that you'd be willing to help, but we were still at the point of figuring out what we wanted to do, and how to do it. Now we're ready for the additional hands/fingers/however-you-manipulate-the-internets.

Right now we've got roughly a thousand posts that need to be catalogued on delicious. I've done eighty or so, mostly just getting a feel for the task. I've got step-by-step instructions that I'll send you if you volunteer. (In short: add the post to delicious; update delicious tags; update LJ tags.) It goes quickly enough once you've got the rhythm, but like most clerical work, it does tend to run toward the persnickety-fiddly side.

I was thinking that I'd assign posts to volunteers by month, but then I took a closer look at the comm history...

Yeah. Unless any of you are looking at those RaceFail months and clamoring for the opportunity to take them on, I'll divide them into smaller sections.

My druther is to have ten-ish volunteers who are willing to do a hundred posts each, but I'm happy to take whatever offers of help I get. (And if you want to do more, I won't say no! I'm suggesting 100 posts per person only because I'd rather not burn anyone out.)

If you want to volunteer, please give me an indication of how much you're willing to take on, as well as a way for me to reach you by email. ETA: If you don't want to leave a comment with your email, you can get it to me by LJ message.

...and, that's what I've got.

So, does anyone want to help move the author tags over to delicious?