Suppose I own a resource like The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, which contains "22 books in 5 volumes." Well, it's all in one book in my Logos Library. I'd like to be able to add "virtual books" to my Library so that I can:
- see book titles that are hidden within a multi-book volume like this when I'm in my Library
- open them (i.e., jump directly to that location in the containing resource) directly from my Library
- give them their own short titles, tags, and ratings that may differ from other books contained in that resource
- add them to collections (e.g., I might have an Art collection and want to add Schaeffer's book Art and the Bible to that collection so that I could search only within that portion of Schaeffer's ouevre along with other books on Art)
- generate bibliographies of such collections
- have a better idea how many books I really have in my Library
Here's how I envision it working. A "virtual book" would have most of the features of a real book in the Library. I would enter the Author, Title, and optional Short Title, and direct Logos where to find that "virtual book" in my Library (I'm not sure how that would work: perhaps I'd go to that location in the TOC of the containing resource and copy the location as a URL and paste it into some edit control to tell Logos this is where the book begins; but then I'd also have to be able to tell Logos where that book ends so that it would know where to limit its searches if I searched through that book; perhaps there is already internal tagging that blocks off sections like this for the TOC so maybe giving the beginning would be sufficient). The virtual book would inherit the other publication information (Publisher, Date, Series if any) from the containing resource. I'm not sure what to do about the other metadata. It's conceivable that one book within a resource like this might be in a different language than the rest, but not likely, so inheriting the Language might be sufficient. Subjects would be difficult, because the containing resource's subject might not be sufficient or accurate for each book within it. For example, each of Schaeffer's books was published separately as well as this Collected Works 5-volume set, and there are probably proper LOC subjects for them all, and they probably differ from each other, but Logos probably doesn't have access to that info from within the book file. Hmm... It's a problem to be solved, but I bet it isn't unsolvable.
