My Tags

No, you can't, so I will once again take the opportunity to champion for a My Tag Manager. Until that happens, My Tags are way to difficult to manage to meet a fraction of their potential.

This issue is on Uservoice. http://logos.uservoice.com/forums/42823-logos-bible-software-4/suggestions/564609-provide-management-of-mytags?ref=title

My votes are tied up elsewhere but this is a needed improvement in the program.

Rosie Perera said:

I just sacrificed a vote from something else for this. We need more than 10 votes. This is nuts. I keep playing musical chairs with my votes. And some of my pet features are being left without a seat.

I agree and yet.... at least it accurately reflects the resources that Logos can put towards any number of projects.

My angst would be satisfied if I could Que up some votes: i.e. place the first ten and then assign votes to automatically drift to the remaining list as the ones on top were completed.

I had a spare vote, so added it to this.  Even though I've not yet entirely mastered/ understood MyTags!

Rosie Perera said:

I just sacrificed a vote from something else for this. We need more than 10 votes. This is nuts. I keep playing musical chairs with my votes. And some of my pet features are being left without a seat.

Maybe we need more of the 40,000 posters to vote?  [[hint, hint, need a new thread on user voice]]

Maybe we need ranked voting? [where you vote for your top 10. Your first place gets 10 points, second 9 etc]

Maybe once Logos accepts all the votes are released?

Frank Fenby said:

I took the suggested tags from Camp 2 and used them as a base for starting to work on my controlled vocabulary. Here is the present, very, very unfinished state. I would welcome any comments. 8004.Fenby Controlled Vocabulary for Logos Tagging.docx

Frank, I really like the principles from your controlled vocabulary document. I've taken the liberty of copying them I'd like to request that you copy them out of that document and paste them here so they can be found again later by a Google search of the forums. I will find them handy to recommend to others!

EDIT: Removed the copied principles, so Frank can copy/paste them himself. I don't ever want to be mistakenly cited as the source of them in the future.

Frank Fenby said:

Rosie Perera said:

I don't ever want to be mistakenly cited as the source of them in the future

Rosie, as long as God gets the glory, I do not care who gets the credit. I am glad you like them and hope others find them helpful. Some of these came from spending time reading Internet articles on controlled vocabularies. The others from trying it and making mistakes. Here is the first draft of my own principles for a controlled vocabulary (CV) for tagging Logos resources. Others may need different guidelines.

Principles:

1.       A few tags with a lot of entries are better than a lot of sparse tags. If a tag gets too large then go back and divided it as illustrated below. The fewer the tags the better. Resist the urge to add new tags to the controlled vocabulary (CV)!

2.       Do not use tags for groupings that are simple selection of a library field. For example type:…, author:…, rating:…,languages:…, publisher:…, series:… . You may need to build a collection of these for use in some tools such as the commentary section of a passage guide. (Bible Harmonies is an example.)

3.       Most books should have at least one tag.

4.       Feel free to add many tags to any one book. (Just remember how hard it is to remove a single tag from a group of books with multiple tags.) This overlap is one of the advantages of tagging over the older classification systems such as Dewey Decimal numbers and LOC call numbers.

5.       Never use a tag that is not on the controlled vocabulary list!

6.       Keep spaces out of a tag name. (Spaces may require putting the tag name in quotes when doing a search.)

7.       Resist the urge to use tags for things that should be a field in the library record. (Submit a feature request to Logos. For example: purchase price, purchase date, etc.)

8.       Tags do not need to be mutually exclusive. This overlap is another of the advantage of tagging

9.       Document the controlled vocabulary!

 

[Y]

Excellent advice. Glory be to God!

Armin said:

Can anybody explain the pros and cons of using collections vs. tags? For instance, should I tag all apologetic books with the tag apologetics, or should I use a collection that contains all apologetic books?

It isn't really a question of using collections vs. tags. Sometimes you need to use both in conjunction with each other. My most common use of tagging is to mark books that should be included in a dynamic collection which got missed by the collection rule because a keyword wasn't included in its title or other metadata. For example, I have a collection of Archaeological Resources which has the rule title:archaeolog OR subject:archaeolog OR mytag:archaeology. The first two terms will pick up every resource in my library that has archaeology or archaeological in the title or subject field. But that misses a few relevant titles such as The Context of Scripture, Volume Two: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World and Urbanism in the Aegean Bronze Age. So I have tagged these latter two (and others) with my tag Archaeology, and they included in that collection because of the final term mytag:archaeology (case is insensitive).

Most places in Logos where you can use a Collection, you can accomplish the same thing by using the automatically generated collection mytag:****   (e.g., mytag:Apologetics). Those "mytag" auto-collections show up in the Collections dropdown in the Search panel, for example, and you can select them in the Collection section of custom Passage Guides.

However there are some things you can do with Collections that you can't do that way:

• You can print/export a bibliography from a Collection
• You can make collections which combine different tags. For example, I sometimes find myself wanting to exclude a whole bunch of books from a Search based on some tag I'd applied to them, and a collection can do this. I just add ANDNOT mytag:*** to the end of the collection definition rule.
• Furthermore, collection titles can be nice and long and descriptive, whereas you tend to want to keep tags short since a book can have multiple tags and you want to be able to read them all easily in the Library "My Tags" column. I have a tag for each of my commentary categories (AppComm for application commentaries, CritComm for critical commentaries, etc.). And then I've got a collection for each of those which is simply made with a rule such as mytag:AppComm, but the title of the collection can be more descriptive (e.g., "Application/Devotional Commentaries", "Critical/Scholarly Commentaries", etc.).

So think of tags as supporting your collections, but not a replacement for them.

There are also a few things I use tags for that are unrelated to collections. I tag every item with the date that I bought it (e.g., Bought: 20110228), and also the original Bundle or Base package that it came with (e.g., Base: Portfolio or Bundle: Calvin 500) and/or the sale that I aquired it in (e.g., Sale: Xmas 2010). Finally, I still sometimes think in terms of old fashioned physical bookshelves as a way of browsing what I've got, so when I acquire books I try to think of where I might shelve these in a physical bookcase, and then I tag them accordingly (e.g., Shelf: History). These shelvings usually don't correspond exactly to my collections. But it gives me great pleasure to be able to filter my library by shelf and just look at, say, my history books and find something serendipitously that I might want to pick off the shelf and start reading.

Frank Fenby said:

Here is the present, very, very unfinished state. I would welcome any comments. 8004.Fenby Controlled Vocabulary for Logos Tagging.docx

This is good Frank, thank you for sharing.

It was interesting to trying to compare it to my own lists. My trouble is that I started editing and creating a control list but have since fallen back to 'just tagging' based on what I think I was doing in the summer. I still have the excel list but there are now many additional tags that need tidying.

Does anybody know how to export the tags to CSV (or any other format)? The resource details are not essential, I am only after a list that I can use to identify my current tags.

Martin Folley said:

Does anybody know how to export the tags to CSV (or any other format)? The resource details are not essential, I am only after a list that I can use to identify my current tags.

Just click on the My Tags column in your Library to sort by that field, and you'll see a list of all the tags you're currently using, with all the resources that have each of those tags collapsed under it. You can expand each group by clicking on the tag. It's easy that way to notice problems, like where you have two different spellings of what was intended to be the same tag, and then you can go back and fix them up.

I'm still hoping we'll someday get a tag management tool so that we can easily rename tags, merge tags (e.g., two different spellings of what should be the same tag), and remove a single tag from a selected group of resources without affecting the other tags assigned to them.

Rosie Perera said:

Just click on the My Tags column in your Library to sort by that field, and you'll see a list of all the tags you're currently using, with all the resources that have each of those tags collapsed under it. You can expand each group by clicking on the tag. It's easy that way to notice problems, like where you have two different spellings of what was intended to be the same tag, and then you can go back and fix them up.

Thanks Rosie.

I was aware of this method ... last time I did this and then typed each tag into Excel to generate a list.

I would like to be able to see my controlled list as I am tagging so that I can achieve some form of consistency.  

Most of my tagging is done from the library (since I cannot multiple select or tag from collections). I know I could load each resource, one at a time, from a collection but I find this to be cumbersome when compared to the info view in the library.

Martin Folley said:

I would like to be able to see my controlled list as I am tagging so that I can achieve some form of consistency.

If you open up your collections tool to a collection that includes all your resources, you can then sort the collection by tags. You can then open the library up alongside, and do your tagging in the library, whilst seeing the list of tags in Collections.

Mark Barnes said:

If you open up your collections tool to a collection that includes all your resources, you can then sort the collection by tags. You can then open the library up alongside, and do your tagging in the library, whilst seeing the list of tags in Collections.

An excellent idea! Simple but effective ... thank you.

Mark Barnes said:

It's in %localappdata%\Logos4\Data\{random}\Library Catalog

 

Thanks Mark.

I had SQLiteStudio already installed on my mac so it was only a matter of minutes to copy the db, open it up and export the table as a CSV.

My next project might be linking the db with my own db so that I can add notes to my tags.