Need help understanding tags/metatags

[sara.abreu]

Bookends beginner here, so apologies if question is a bit basic and specific to my case.

I'm trying to understand how metatags and tags work. I've read the user guide, and I understand about the creation of metatag hierarchies and the tags that are inside each. But I'm struggling to find the best way to tag my references.

I'm a zoo veterinarian and so I study/work with a multitude of diseases and species. I want to be able to search/filter my references so that I can search by 'body system AND taxonomy'. I also want smart groups divided by each. So one group just for all turtle articles, one for elephants, one for all the eye diseases, one for all the brain diseases, and so on. I thought the best way to do this would be by tags.

So I've created a Body Systems metatag with each body system as a tag and a metatag hierarchy for the main taxonomic families, and was thinking of adding the species as tags inside each, as I process each article. So Mammals --> Felidae as metatags, and then inside Felidae --> Lynx, Caracal, Panthera, etc.

1 - As I understand it, there is not a specific field to add tags/metatags and they would need to be added either to keywords or notes? Could I make a custom user field for inserting these tags so that they are separated from the article's published keywords and easier to see? Or would that make them not searchable if I want to create a quick smart group for a specific case?

2 - Also, species/family names can be complex, and for some of these makes more sense to have several families in a tag, for example "Apodiformes & Coliiformes". But there is no way I'll remember how to write that tag exactly the same every time. Is there an option to create some sort of dropdown menu, or a quickly accessible list of all the tags I've created? I read somewhere about autocomplete as well, but can't find how that would work. Or should I aim to only create tags I can remember precisely?

Any suggestions on how to best go about this would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Sara

[Jon]

(1) Yes, you can put the tag in keywords (a good place) or notes. Or you could use a custom field, it's up to you. Remember that metatags are just a handy way of searching for ANY of it's components when you search for the tag (and if do an actual search, you need to add the ellipsis after the metatag word so that Bookends knows you're using a metatag).

(2) The tag cloud is a quick way to see all your tags (or a subset) and select the one(s) you want to filter reference by.

Jon
Sonny Software