Need Help With Collection Rule

Do any of you have a better collection rule I can use, or at least suggestions on how to improve mine? I'm trying to develop a collection of all my Greek teaching tools, such as textbooks, courses, grammars, and the like. The rule I'm using is

type:monograph AND subject:greek ANDNOT author:emil OR type:grammar ANDNOT title:hebrew OR type:courseware

but I am missing a few things and gathering a few extra as well. (For example, I'm getting Latin textbooks, but I can't exclude 'Latin' since it is in the title of the Walker Pronunciation Guide, and so forth.)

I expect I'm not using some parentheses correctly as well.

All suggestions are welcome.

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Comments

DMB

Well, I'm not a collection person, but policy-wise, whenever there's a sequence of 'and' plus 'or', I use parens. You never know if they're parsing leftward or rightward or optimizing. I guess you're seeking parens-expertise (which depends on what you're wanting)?

Wolfgang Schneider

Sometimes when it's too complicate to build a single rule covering various kinds of situations, one could use a rule which produces a number of results and then add these to the "+keep these resources" box, then change the rule to find more results and do the same to add those to the resources to keep, and repeat this until the resources you want to have included in the collection are all added to the "keep" selection.

MJ. Smith

I expect I'm not using some parentheses correctly as well.

So much so that I don't know what you are trying to do. My guess, and it is only a guess is that you mean something like

(type:monograph AND subject:greek ANDNOT author:emil) OR (type:grammar ANDNOT title:hebrew) OR type:courseware

Beloved Amodeo

I expect I'm not using some parentheses correctly as well.

So much so that I don't know what you are trying to do. My guess, and it is only a guess is that you mean something like

(type:monograph AND subject:greek ANDNOT author:emil) OR (type:grammar ANDNOT title:hebrew) OR type:courseware

MJ like you I'm in the dark as to Doc's ultimate goal, but I was able to produce a manageable collection with this rule:

type:monograph, subject:greek ANDNOT author:emil, title:hebrew -type:grammar, -type:course

However, I have a question; why is it that what was once a method of excluding references no longer appears to be effective has something changed or am I recalling amiss? And, to be clear I'm referring to placing a ( - ) sign before your value of reference. It doesn't work in the library either.

MJ. Smith

why is it that what was once a method of excluding references no longer appears to be effective has something changed or am I recalling amiss?

While I am familiar with that outside of Faithlife products, I never used it in Logos/Verbum - either because it wasn't valid or because I didn't know about it. I do remember users begging for a NOT.

Beloved Amodeo

why is it that what was once a method of excluding references no longer appears to be effective has something changed or am I recalling amiss?

While I am familiar with that outside of Faithlife products, I never used it in Logos/Verbum - either because it wasn't valid or because I didn't know about it. I do remember users begging for a NOT.

I think this is a valuable feature and if it has been abandoned for some unstated reason either an alternative or a readoption of this feature should receive immediate attention.
I'm fairly certain this has been available in the past. I can't in any way justify the elimination of this valuable feature.

Kiyah

The rule has to be so complex and specific that it may just be easier to use several rules to identify all of the resources you want and then tag them all with the same descriptive tag, like greek-tools. Here's what my rule looked like if I were attempting the same thing for my library (I left latin in the excluded resources because I don't own the Walker resource):

lang:english AND type:(monograph,grammar,lexicon,course,bible-commentary,bible-notes) AND (subject:(greek,language) ANDNOT subject:(hebrew,aramaic) OR author:(mounce-william,vine,leedy,hurst-rebekah,robertson-archibald,strong-james,vincent-marvin,wuest)) -author:lange -subject:(ugaritic,latin,arabic,sermon,preaching,trinity,creeds,syriac,isaiah,psalm,judaism,worship,classics,narration,paradox,literature,philemon,paul,corinthians,homer,oral,rhetoric,"Fathers of the church, Greek")

...but it required a ton of exclusions (which is usually an indication that it is not a good rule). The complexity is caused by the fact that Faithlife's subjects don't seem to be consistent. However, I wasn't able to successfully rely on the community tags either.

Either way, play around with the rule and then tag the stuff you want. Then just use the tag to search the resources going forward. Since any collection you make will be super manual anyway, you might as well just use tags.

Beloved Amodeo

you might as well just use tags.

Amen

Doc B

you might as well just use tags.

Had I tagged these as I acquired them, that's the route I'd choose.

I could easily tag them if I had a good collection rule to gather them up for me (thus this post).

I'd rather use tags in the future as I find manual collection rules inefficient and a defeat of the purpose of the collection tool ITFP.

Tags it will eventually be, but getting them in a group to tag is the game right now.

Kiyah

So do you specifically not want any lexicons or grammatically-oriented commentaries? You only want monographs and grammars with a couple of mobile ed courses?

You could try this if you only wanted the subject "Greek language" as MJ has above:

type:(monograph,grammar,courseware) AND subject:(greek-language)

MJ. Smith

I'd like to point out that much of the "complexity" of this search/selection is in understanding what the OP actually wants. No amount of simplification of the search will solve this part of the problem.

Doc B

So do you specifically not want any lexicons or grammatically-oriented commentaries? You only want monographs and grammars with a couple of mobile ed courses?

Basically, yes. I want teaching tools, not reference tools. With apologies to Robin Thicke, there are blurred lines there. Some Gk references are easily used as teaching tools, and many teaching tools can also be references. But basically, I want anything that has been (or should be) used in an intro- or second-level Greek class at university or seminary.

Dave Hooton

MJ like you I'm in the dark as to Doc's ultimate goal, but I was able to produce a manageable collection with this rule:
type:monograph, subject:greek ANDNOT author:emil, title:hebrew -type:grammar, -type:course

However, I have a question; why is it that what was once a method of excluding references no longer appears to be effective has something changed or am I recalling amiss? And, to be clear I'm referring to placing a ( - ) sign before your value of reference. It doesn't work in the library either.

It needs parentheses to clarify your intention either side of the ANDNOT
type:monograph, subject:greek should be type:monograph OR subject:greek

you can't mix comma , with other operators

author:emil, title:hebrew should be author:emil OR title:hebrew for the same reason.
-type:grammar, -type:course should be -type:grammar -type:course

the comma (OR) conflicts with wanting to exclude both types i.e. it reads exclude type:grammar OR exclude type:course rather than exclude type:grammar AND exclude type:course.

So then, this rule should be: (type:monograph OR subject:greek) ANDNOT (author:emil OR title:hebrew) -type:grammar -type:course

And the - retains its ability to exclude terms.

Beloved Amodeo

MJ like you I'm in the dark as to Doc's ultimate goal, but I was able to produce a manageable collection with this rule:
type:monograph, subject:greek ANDNOT author:emil, title:hebrew -type:grammar, -type:course

However, I have a question; why is it that what was once a method of excluding references no longer appears to be effective has something changed or am I recalling amiss? And, to be clear I'm referring to placing a ( - ) sign before your value of reference. It doesn't work in the library either.

It needs parentheses to clarify your intention either side of the ANDNOT

type:monograph, subject:greek should be type:monograph OR subject:greek

you can't mix comma , with other operators

author:emil, title:hebrew should be author:emil OR title:hebrew for the same reason.

-type:grammar, -type:course should be -type:grammar -type:course

the comma (OR) conflicts with wanting to exclude both types i.e. it reads exclude type:grammar OR exclude type:course rather than exclude type:grammar AND exclude type:course.

So then, this rule should be: (type:monograph OR subject:greek) ANDNOT (author:emil OR title:hebrew) -type:grammar -type:course

And the - retains its ability to exclude terms.

Thanks for the clarification.

And the - retains its ability to exclude terms.

This is good news!