About the Library

LibraryThing is a free site in which you can get and display book information. You can also add tags, comments, ratings, and reviews. Since At Home Science has books at its core, the information at LibraryThing is half of this project! To get to the At Home Science Library, click on the LibraryThing icon. If you click on a picture, and if the picture is supplied by Amazon, you will be brought to Amazon.com; if you click on the title/author, you will be brought to LibraryThing social data for that book (owners, reviews, tag cloud, and such.)

I use the tags for subject categorization. Here’s a list:

Activities (books with experiments or other activities)
Biology (processes, internal anatomy, classification, microscopic life)
Biomes (describes flora, fauna, and geologic features together)
Chemistry
Earth
Natural History
Nature (external, visual features and habits of plants and animals)
Physics
Space
Weather

Other tags describe the general reader level:

Preschool (up to first grade and is mostly picture books or short texts)
Beginner (present an introduction to a topic without going too in depth)
Intermediate (books contain more extensive and in-depth information)
Advanced (books are for high school level)

I don’t find ages or grades to be as useful as this system. You may have a 5th grader that has never covered a topic before and may do better starting out with a beginner book. You may have a 3rd grader that loves science and is quite ready for intermediate books and activities.

I also use other tags and comments and labels to describe the books, like:

Literature (a story with a narrative style)
Resource
Pictorial (photographs/illustrations are particularly good)
Series names

This is the labeling scheme as it currently stands. I will, of course, edit this document to reflect any changes that may occur. Feedback on this is greatly appreciated!