Is there an easier way to create a collection?

Ron,

If you follow the link in my signature, you'll see two videos about creating collections. You can use the searchterms AND, OR NOT and ANDNOT to help in your creating of commentaries.

You could also let us know what you're trying to achieve and perhaps someone will suggest a suitable string.

Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/98824#Comment_98824

I have had problems creating collections before, but it is more difficult with the release of the Calvin 500 prepub. I would like to be able to type "Calvin" in the "start with resources matching" box , remove the resources I don't want and save that result. Then type another search term in the "start with resources matching" box without losing the resources I have already added.

Right now I find myself opening up my library and dragging each resource individually. It works, but takes a lot of time.

Any ideas?

Hi Ron, I know exactly what you're talking about! I used to open the Library along side the Collections pane to drag items individually from there. Then I progressed to using rules in the collections pane. I learned that I could type a collection rule (or a portion of one) in the Library pane and get a similarly limited list. This wasn't in order to drag the books one-by-one, though, it was a great way, I figured, to check each piece of the rule as I went. So for example, I'd type author:calvin in the "start with resources matching" box. Then I'd go over to my Library pane and type title:calvin -author:calvin to see if there were any books with Calvin in their title that weren't already picked up by my first search term. If indeed there were, then I'd add title:calvin to my rule in the Collections panel, and keep going thusly. Finally I realized I could do away with the Library window altogether, by just adding (temporarily) the minus signs in my collection rule as I'm building it up. I also sometimes select what I've got thus far in my rule, press Ctrl+X to cut it to the clipboard, try out some more rule terms and then paste back the rule as I had it before in front of the new terms, fixing up the parentheses and ORs and ANDs and NOTs (or minus signs) as necessary.

Ronald Quick

I'm trying to create a collection of the Calvin 500 Collection (108 Volumes).

Thanks for the ideas.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/98859#Comment_98859

Ron,

I'm using the following collections string: author:"calvin, john", title:calvin, subject:calvin

It's slightly too broad, but you can remove the handful of resources you don't want. Personally, if I have other books about Calvin/Calvinism I want them in my Calvin collection, regardless of whether they're in the official Calvin 500.

Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/98859#Comment_98859

I'm trying to create a collection of the Calvin 500 Collection (108 Volumes).

Thanks for the ideas.

I realize this won't help you now, but maybe in the future. Every time I add a resource to my library I filter my library to everything that does not have a "Old Resources" Tag, then I tag all the new items with a unique identifier. For instance today I added the R.C. Sproul library so I tagged those resources as "Sproul". When I download a single resource I tag it "Downloaded". then I also tag them as "Old Resources" so that the next time I add something they are filtered out easily.

At this point I think the easiest way to do it is to tag the items in your library as "Calvin 500" and then create a collection with the string mytag:"calvin 500". If you do a collection with a string like "author:Calvin" future purchases from Calvin will be automatically added to your collection and tagging from the library is much easier then dragging items one at a time because you can tag multiple items at once.

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/98880#Comment_98880

Ron,

I'm using the following collections string: author:"calvin, john", title:calvin, subject:calvin

It's slightly too broad, but you can remove the handful of resources you don't want. Personally, if I have other books about Calvin/Calvinism I want them in my Calvin collection, regardless of whether they're in the official Calvin 500.

Mark

Thanks for the idea Mark, I borrowed it and created my own collection. I agree with you, I would prefer any Calvin resources in there too.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/98824#Comment_98824

Is there a way to make a rule that excludes a "type" like dictionary or bible ?

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/98996#Comment_98996

sure is. First you want to list every book in your library

rating:>=0

Then you want to exclude the books of that type

rating:>=0 ANDNOT type:dictionary, bible

The above string will create a collection with everything not a Bible or dictionary.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99003#Comment_99003

sure is. First you want to list every book in your library

rating:>=0

Then you want to exclude the books of that type

rating:>=0 ANDNOT type:dictionary, bible

The above string will create a collection with everything not a Bible or dictionary.

What I want is every commentary except bibles and dictionaries.

What I have is "Commentary, Commentaries, Warfield, Owen". If I add "ANDNOT type:dictionary, bible" then I loose all the bible commentaries

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99010#Comment_99010

What I want is every commentary except bibles and dictionaries.

ah. I think what your looking for then is

type:"bible commentary"

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99012#Comment_99012

What I want is every commentary except bibles and dictionaries.

ah. I think what your looking for then is

type:"bible commentary"

That works, Is there a way to get two collections open at the same time so I can compare the results? I tried but failed.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99029#Comment_99029

Is there a way to get two collections open at the same time so I can compare the results? I tried but failed.

There's no way to open two collections at the same time. However you can at least check how many books are in each collection to get a first idea as to whether they are the same. And if you're running 4.0b beta, you could export each collection to a bibliography (saved in a text file) and then compare the two bibliographies.

Another way to see the difference between two collections is to take the rule for one collection and then subtract the rule for the other and see if you end up with any resources at all in that difference selection. For example, the Calvin 500 bundle recently shipped. I might have had a Calvin collection already using this rule: title:calvin OR author:calvin. Now suppose I set up a new collection for Calvin 500 by tagging each one of those books "Calvin 500" and using the rule mytag:"Calvin 500". Now I want to compare these two collections to see if there are any books that are in one but not the other (and vice versa). Looking at the total resource count, I see that the first one is the larger collection, so I put that one first and subtract the second (important not to leave a space after the - sign; it means ANDNOT when prefixed immediately to a term in a collection rule).

So you can accomplish this one of two ways:

title:calvin OR author:calvin ANDNOT mytag:"Calvin 500"

title:calvin OR author:calvin -mytag:"Calvin 500"

Note that if the second collection rule were more complex than one term, you'd need to put it all in parentheses to have it all negated with ANDNOT or the minus sign.

So if I wanted to reverse that "subtraction" I'd do this:

mytag:"Calvin 500" ANDNOT (title:calvin OR author:calvin)

Lo and behold, I discover there are three books in the Calvin 500 bundle that do not have Calvin's name in their title nor him as the author.

So you can find out all kinds of neat things by subtracting collection rules.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99029#Comment_99029

Well, I must admit I've never tried this personally so I don't know for sure how it would work, but what if you took one collection string, put it into a new collection, and then said "-[second collection string]. This should reveal any books in the first string that are not duplicated in the second. Then reverse and put [second string]-[first string] to reveal those in the second not duplicated in the first.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99051#Comment_99051

Well, I must admit I've never tried this personally so I don't know for sure how it would work, but what if you took one collection string, put it into a new collection, and then said "-[second collection string]. This should reveal any books in the first string that are not duplicated in the second. Then reverse and put [second string]-[first string] to reveal those in the second not duplicated in the first.

That's exactly what I just described (though Philip did it more elegantly and succinctly), and it does work.

Also, you need parentheses around the collection string to the right of the minus sign (not square brackets) if it's got multiple terms in it; and be sure there's no space between the minus sign and the collection string (or open parenthesus).

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99057#Comment_99057

That cool!

Thanks Philip & Rosie

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99057#Comment_99057

That's exactly what I just described (though Philip did it more elegantly and succinctly), and it does work.

On a forum great minds think alike and type at the same time :-)

Timothy Shrimpton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99057#Comment_99057

Is there a way to add a collection to a collection? I've got things divided up pretty well, but I'd like to maybe be able to search all of those in one massive collection without having to rebuild them all.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99070#Comment_99070

Is there a way to add a collection to a collection?

Yes. Just create an empty collection and drag your other collections into the "Plus these resources" section.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99082#Comment_99082

Is there a way to add a collection to a collection?

Yes. Just create an empty collection and drag your other collections into the "Plus these resources" section.

To add a bit to Mark's suggestion click on "Open" and drag the collection from this list to the "Plus these resources"

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99110#Comment_99110

Is there a way to add a collection to a collection?

Yes. Just create an empty collection and drag your other collections into the "Plus these resources" section.

To add a bit to Mark's suggestion click on "Open" and drag the collection from this list to the "Plus these resources"

To add even more, watch Mark's excellent video on creating advanced dynamic collections: http://www.vimeo.com/8145864

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99068#Comment_99068

On a forum great minds think alike and type at the same time :-)

This thread has been a great help! Here's another challenge for the great minds behind it:

I want to create separate collections for

all the books from my original L3 Bible Study Library base package
the new books added when I crossgraded to L4 Bible Study Library
the additional books I added from the Essential IVP Reference Collection 3.0
other bundles, collections, etc. I purchased

Short of adding them book by book, how can I do this?

Thanks.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99187#Comment_99187

On a forum great minds think alike and type at the same time :-)
This thread has been a great help! Here's another challenge for the great minds behind it: I want to create separate collections for
all the books from my original L3 Bible Study Library base package

the new books added when I crossgraded to L4 Bible Study Library

the additional books I added from the Essential IVP Reference Collection 3.0

other bundles, collections, etc. I purchased

Short of adding them book by book, how can I do this?

Thanks.

I'd use Tags for this sort of thing. Yes, you'll need to tag every book, but it's easy to select a bunch of books at a time and tag them all at once (at least you can do this in 4.0b, not sure about 4.0a). So, for example, the contents of the L3 Bible Study Library base package can be found here: http://wiki.logos.com/Logos_3.0_Bible_Study_Library. Add a tag of L3BSL to all of those resources, and then make a collection using the rule mytag:L3BSL. Similarly for other collections and bundles you've purchased. For the new books added in the crossgrade, you might need to do a big of figgerin' - based on the chart here (http://www.logos.com/comparison). But once you've got the L3BSL tags done, it's a pretty easy matter to show only those books that you've bought since you got your L3 base package. Just negate that rule: -mytag:L3BS. Since a negated rule can't stand alone by itself (it has to have something that it's being "subtracted" from, you can think of it that way), you'd start with a term of rating:>=0 (which would pick up your entire library) and then -mytag:L3BS. That would show only your recently acquired books. Then within that smaller list it will be easier for you to pick out which books you got as part of the crossgrade, and those you'd tage L4BSL (you might also want to add the L4BSL tag to everything in L3BSL too, just for completeness). The contents of the IVP Reference Collection are listed here: http://www.logos.com/products/details/1516. Tag them all as, say, IVPREF. You can limit a selection in your library to publisher:InterVarsity and that will weed out most of what shouldn't be included in that collection, but you'll still need to visually check before selecting only those ones you want to apply the tag to.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99190#Comment_99190

Thanks, Rosie. (Fastest-fingers reply again!)

Yes, I guess that's how I'd go about setting up the collections, but ...

Yes, you'll need to tag every book.

That's really just too time-consuming. Even though I could tag multiple books at once, I'd still have to pick the books out from the list one by one.

I was hoping that there's a field in the metadata that identifies which bundle (if any) a particular book came with. I thought that this was perhaps possible, since we're told that, for a small transfer fee, we can transfer the ownership of single books to another Logos user only if we've bought them at as single books; but we cannot break apart a bundle that we purchased, and transfer individual books from there. So I thought that data could perhaps be somewhere in the metadata, which we could then make use of for building dynamic collections. Perhaps not.

Which incidentally, makes an argument in favor of the old L3 static collections. In L3, someone could painstakingly build a collection (eg. L3BSL) adding book by book, then share that collection with the whole community by posting that file online. Anyone else can just download that file and place it into their appropriate L3 folder. Time spent by one person (preferably not myself [:P]) benefits an entire community. Not anymore with dynamic collections in L4 (which, of course, have more then their fair share of merits too).

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99196#Comment_99196

No, I don't believe that info is stored anywhere in the metadata, at least not in a form that is user-accessible (at least nothing documented or that we've stumbled upon as beta testers). What you point out about passing on licenses would be a good reason to ask for it to be added, though. They've got all this info on their servers somewhere, so it should be possible to add. But a painstaking book-by-book process.

I wasn't thinking you'd have to click one-by-one on every single book to select them all. You can group them together by type or publisher or electronic publication date, for example, and then select a whole group of them all at once: click on the first in the group, hold down Shift key and click on the last in the group and it will select all of them within that range.

I admit it would be tricky to select all the books came with your first base package without having that metadata in there. You could do it in chunks. All the English Bibles, for example. I doubt any of those were added on later in bundles you bought later. The rule for them would be: type:bible lang:en, then select them all at once, and slap a L3BSL tag on them all. Then you can get all the "Be" series commentaries because their author is Wiersbe, so a rule like type:commentary author:wiersbe would catch them all. Alas, this would still be grunge work. And you're right, there's no way under the current architecture for someone to share all this work with someone else once it's been done. A shortcoming I guess they didn't anticipate when they did the redesign. People have been able to share their dynamic collection rules, though. There are a bunch of them over at http://wiki.logos.com/Collections -- scroll to the bottom. If there were a way to make a dynamic collection that contained your entire L3 Bible Study Library, you'd be able to share it. So now we just need to request that Logos add metadata to resources based on what packages or bundles they came with. (I'm not sure that would really be easy to determine; I might have bought resource A separately and then upgraded to a package that included it anyway, while you might have upgraded to that package without having bought the separate work; and Martha might have bought that resource alone without ever upgrading to any bundle or package that included it; which metadata should each of ours include? Some resources appear in multiple bundles/packages; see Pilgrim's Progress, which comes in almost all the base packages).

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99206#Comment_99206

Thanks again, Rosie. I actually understood you the first time.

But, just for the fun of it, let me illustrate how time-demanding this process will be, using your example of the All English Bibles. Here's what I did:

1) type:bible lang:en yields 26 books in my library

2) Select all 26 books and tag them with L3BSL (yes, you can do group-tagging in 4.0a)

3) Visual check of http://wiki.logos.com/Logos_3.0_Bible_Study_Library shows L3BSL comes with only 18 English bibles

4) Which 8 did not come with L3BSL? Manually scan each of the 26, comparing book-by-book against the list in #3, finds only these 7:

Apocrypha of the Old Testament
GOD'S WORD Translation
The Holy Bible, Translated from the Latin Vulgate
The Lexham English Bible
The New American Bible
New International Reader’s Version
Today's New International Version

5) Where's that last one? Careful re-examination reveals that I have 2 versions of the KJV (one from 1769 and another from 1900). Which one came with L3BSL, and which one came with another bundle? I don't care. I'll just consider both to have come with L3BSL. Mystery solved.

6) Select the 7 books from #4 above and untag them, leaving 19 tagged as L3BSL.

Total time taken: 10-15 mins (and that was to do the easiest "type" to create a rule for)

So am I prepared to repeat this process for the whole list of books - some of which may not even have enough commonality to create rules that will help me to group them, and enough distinctiveness for those rules to exclude other books? Probably not. OK. So you called my bluff. I don't really need to create these collections, at least not that much that I'd put all that time into doing it. I'd probably be better off reading those books rather than organising them [:)]

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99216#Comment_99216

Nevertheless, thanks again Rosie. Appreciate the helpful tips and insight. [:D]

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/99187#Comment_99187

This thread has been a great help! Here's another challenge for the great minds behind it:
I want to create separate collections for

all the books from my original L3 Bible Study Library base package

the new books added when I crossgraded to L4 Bible Study Library

the additional books I added from the Essential IVP Reference Collection 3.0

other bundles, collections, etc. I purchased

Short of adding them book by book, how can I do this?

Unfortunately, the answer is "You can't". Logos doesn't make available to us which resources come with which package. However, if you tag everything in your library now with a tag like "existing resource", you'll then be able to easily tag new unlocks as they come in.

I have a question for you, though. Why do you want to do this? The point of collections is for restricting searching or creating resource associations. There's no tangible benefit of knowing which resource was purchased through which licence. There are perhaps other more useful collections you might better spend your time creating.