How do you use backlinks & tags?

Knowledge management
1

Hi all,

I’m fairly new here and to setting up my system in Obsidian and am particularly interested in how others are using tags and backlinks to organise their notes - particularly when it comes to collating notes of a common type.

Take for example a literature note, with an attribute/metadata field of “book”. From what I can tell there are 3 ways in seeing a full list of all “books”

  1. Link to a new category page [[book]]
  2. Add a tag for #book
  3. Create a new index page “My list of books” and manually add a link to the literature note.

Now with the above 3 setups, you’ll obviously see your list of books in 3 different ways

  1. As a backlink in the backlinks panel
  2. As a search result in the search panel
  3. However you want in the main content of a “My list of books” page

I’m most inclined to go with option 3 at this point, but really don’t like the manual approach as it seems tedious. One of the main benefits for me with creating my notes in Obsidian (versus Notion) is the speed of which I can write and create links to pages. It, therefore, seems counter-intuitive to have to stop and add links to other index pages mid-flow.

2

For note types I would use a #tag. Search and graph by tags allow for filtering and copying results into a temporary note if necessary.

1 Like
3

I would also include you use Core Plugin>“Starred”, perform a search “[[book]]” and then pick the star tab and “Star Current Search” if you added the link for each landing page for the book as I have.

There are a few options.

  • I tend to use tags for things like wip, stub, expand, map/hub/index (whatever you name your “directory” notes) for anything requiring action or the main highway of information.

As they say, there is no “right or wrong way” other than what works for you.

4

Thanks for the insights! For what then do you use backlinks?