Link, tag or index - can't decide in this case.

berc

Hi! I love writing short essay reviews about classic literature books and I want to connect them somehow. The only thing is that I don't know how. The books are not connected to each other in any way, yet they share one major point: all of them are book reviews.

In the picture, attached below, I used double brackets to link them to a centrail point (book reviews). Should I just tag (#) or should I make the central point (book review) as an index?

wjenkins81

This is just how I would do it... but it depends on how many book reviews you'll write. With this many (10), it's about the same whether you use links or tags. But if you end up writing a large number of reviews, this note linking them all would start to become unwieldy. It would just be a long list of links, and that would seem to be a kind of 'fake' way of connecting them.

If it becomes lots of reviews, a tag starts to make more sense as it's a more natural way to connect things that are initially not naturally connected.

That's just my two cents, but definitely experiment and see what feels more useful to you.

Sascha

1. Create the index ASAP
2. Call this index "structure note" (just for me)

With a tag, you will be able to filter or create a flat list. On the structure you will be able to structure the list as you see fit and have a proper access point and canvas for your reviews.

harr

@berc said:
all of them are book reviews.

In this case I'd consider "book review" a property of the note instead of a connection. The notes are book reviews.

(In Obsidian I use YAML frontmatter for this kind of information. I have a property called "note-type". The content of this note type is a link to a note that describes the note type. So my setup looks very much like yours. The idea is that when I open that linked note, all my notes that link to it will show up in the backlinks window. But that works only in Obsidian. And even there it might be overkill that early in your system building.)

To keep it simple, I'd use a hashtag for now. Maybe something like #my-book-reviews.

BTW, hashtags and index notes (aka structure notes) can coexist peacefully in the same system.

Hashtags are a really simple method to assign a property. They allow you to find all your book reviews with a simple search in any editor or operating system.

If you don't store the property in each note and rely only on an index page, you won't be able to find your book reviews with search.

As always with note-making, it depends on your use case. What do you want to achieve with your notes?

Sascha

@harr said:
BTW, hashtags and index notes (aka structure notes) can coexist peacefully in the same system.

Hashtags are a really simple method to assign a property. They allow you to find all your book reviews with a simple search in any editor or operating system.

100% agree.