What is the difference between a Collection & a Tag when it comes to organizing your resources? Having both seems a bit redundant. Is there an advantage of one over the other?
A tag is a way to identify resources in a manner that is desirable to you. For instance, I may have a book on marriage, but I want to tag it (label it) as "family" as well. Tagging allows me to do that. You can also view Community Tags to see how other Logos users have tagged resources. This is a column that you will see in your library along with tags.
Collections are a way to group resources around a common element, like a tag. For instance, after tagging the resource above as "Family", I can then create a collection to show me all of the Family and Marriage resources by filtering books that have subject:marriage OR tag:family.
Hope this helps. Tagging is for identifying individual books a specific way. Collections are for brining in many resources that share common elements, like subjects, or types (like commentaries), and so forth.
I should also say that once you have created these Collections, you can do many things with them, like seeing only that collection in your library, running searches on just that collections (such as if you want to search ONLY your commentaries), and more.
Jim, some of it is personal preference.
I use tags sparingly to help create collections (!). This is largely because I bought into collections before we had tagging and before dynamic searching using tags was possible.
I also use a few major tags so I can scan parts of my Library. I have the Perseus collection so I have tagged all my non-Perseus resources and Perseus ones so that I can filter for them or to eliminate them in Library. (I also have the American Historical Documents collection and tag those in the same manner.)
I happen to like collections. They help me remember what I have in my Library. But you could have the same information just applying tags.
In terms of differences, collections can be nested, tags cannot be. Collection can be created dynamically. Tags must be manually applied to each resource. (For this last reason alone I would still go with collections.) Collections can have very complicated criteria for selection. One could do the same with tags, but again, it would require a lot of manual tagging.
I'd recommend relying on collections, but judicious use of tags.
My personal feeling is that the collectionsd are useful, but Ineed to do some manual maintenance occasionally when I get new books.
I think that the tags could be more useful, if the user could define more fields: for example one for the resource type (e.g. commentary) and one for the content (e.g. Ef-Thess)
Every Tag is one collection.
Most Logos resources have Subject and Series meta data tagging, which are very useful for dynamic collection rules so purchase of new resource is automatically added to collection. Ideally Subject is complete, but humanly added subject(s) can be missing so wiki has => https://wiki.logos.com/Metadata_correction_proposals A few commentaries lack Bible book tagging in Subject. For example, "College Press NIV Commentary, Minor Prophets, Volume 1" has commentary on half of the minor prophets, but only has "Bible O.T. Minor Prophets" in Subject. Thankful for Faithlife updates of meta data tagging; years ago, "Horae Homileticae" volumes lacked individual Bible books in subject (so am removing Horae titles from commentary collection rules).
Vyrso resources lack meta data tagging.
My collection for "Counsel + Psychology" has rule:
Mytag:Counsel OR Subject:(Counsel, Emotion, Living, "Pastoral care", Psychology) OR Title:(Counsel, "Pastoral care", Psychology)
that adds 30 Counsel tagged items: 22 Vryso eBooks and 8 Logos resources (they do not match Subject nor Title). Personally found adding Counsel tag to a resource being a bit easier than dragging resource into Manually added for collection (also easy to remove tag from resource later if desired).
Tagging can have information that is not available in meta data:
* When purchased, including Free and Community Pricing
* Interlinear (resource has Interlinear display)
* Morphology: e.g. he for Logos Hebrew Morphology and lbs for Logos Greek Morphology
* BibleGrid (personal subset of Bibles for searching with results displayed in Grid; more than Top 5 Bibles, but less than All Bibles)
* Deprecated (e.g. older Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia resources)
Keep Smiling [:)]
One difference I learned from Morris Proctor's "Organize Your Books" video resource is that only a true "Collection" can appear as an option in the Parallel Resources pop-up, when you click on the "parallel" icon of an open resource. (First you have to check the box in the Collection Tool where the Collection is defined.) Below is an example of a tag and a Collection that might seem redundant, but is actually very useful:
You see that I started by tagging all my commentaries to group them into categories that fit my study habits. Then I created Collections defined by the tags. This means that I can arrow-key efficiently through just one category of commentaries at a time. (With the default, you would arrow through all resources with entries for your data type.)
KEY to this system is to choose a one-volume commentary on the whole Bible as your "base" and tag it with all of your categories. Then use your "base" commentary as the starting point for your commentary work, moving from it into the category that you want to review.
Ingenious, I thought. Long-time power users have developed their own methods and work habits, and might find Morris Proctor's videos too basic for their needs. But I highly recommend this video resource to new users, and also to rusty underachievers like me.
