Collections by Publication Date foiled by incorrect data on resources.

I want to create a collection of the "early" reformers (i.e. John Calvin, John Owen, Rutherford, Gillespie, etc.). I seems to me that creating a collection by using the publication date would work well (e.g. publication date between 1500 & 1700). However, it would seem that these dates are not correct in my library.

When looking at John Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion," the "Electronic Publication Date" is the same as the "Publication Date." Surely John Calvin didn't write these in 2010. The translations weren't done this year either.

So I guess the first question is: Where is the proper place to address this issue with Logos to get it fixed?

But the second question would be: What is an alternate way I can create a collection of resources written by the early reformers?

Kazooless

Here is a screen capture with an example of the problem:

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Comments

David P. Moore

Hi Jeff, your publication date observation is just a part of a larger issue with the Logos library metadata. Someone else may have a better idea but the first suggestion to come to my mind is to manually go through your collection and use the MyTag feature, then make a collection on that.

Rosie Perera

Errors in publication date (and other fields in the library) are metadata errors, and we generally report them via the wiki page: http://wiki.logos.com/Metadata_correction_proposals

However if it's a widespread problem, like this is, it would be tedious to enter each one on that page. So there's already a line at the top of that page reminding them they need to address this overall. But it wouldn't hurt to email logos4feedback (at) logos (dot) com as well with a list of authors that you've found this problem with.

As for how to proceed in the meantime without accurate dates, you'll have to do it by author name, and using the list operator (comma) is the easiest way to list a bunch of authors you want to include. The list needs to be in parentheses, with no space after the colon, and there need to be quotation marks around any multi-word names, with the commas not inside the quotation marks, e.g.:

author:("John Calvin", "John Owen", Rutherford, Gillespie)

Someone else was recently collecting a list of names of early Reformers in this thread.

Damian McGrath

Jeff, many of these publication dates are wrong but not for the reasons which you are assuming. The publication date should match the date of publication of the paper edition on which the resource is based, not the original date on which the document itself was written. Calvin is a good example of this - we are dealing with the electronic publication of particular translations into English, many of these come from the last 50 years.

Simon’s Brother

But the second question would be: What is an alternate way I can create a collection of resources written by the early reformers?

Kazooless

I think there are two alternate approaches to build such a collection

1) Build it base on author name. This may not though capture everything so some resources you might have to manually add/exlclude from your collection or maybe pick-up further titles through subject / title search

2) Tag all of the resources that fall into this period with a common tag. You could use the ideas in 1) to capture the majority of resources you need to tag.

An example tag might be : EarlyReformers

When creating multi-word tags I leave out spaces and capitalise each new word. You just then need to add the appropriate tag to new resources you might add to your library and they would then automatically be included in the collection. A good strategy is to give all your current resources a default rating, a number of people use 2. And then adjust resource ratings for individual resources at a later date. This will then easily allow you to find new resources by searching for those resource without a rating that need to be tagged.

Damian's point is correct and what is really need I think is a third date column called 'Original Publication' or something to that effect. If that was the case we could the accurately build a collection as you are desiring and that I agree would be useful.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/173719#Comment_173719

Jeff, many of these publication dates are wrong but not for the reasons which you are assuming. The publication date should match the date of publication of the paper edition on which the resource is based, not the original date on which the document itself was written. Calvin is a good example of this - we are dealing with the electronic publication of particular translations into English, many of these come from the last 50 years.

True, but unfortunately Logos very frequently puts the ElectronicPublicationDate in the PublicationDate field.

Kazooless

Thanks everyone. What a bummer. I hope they fix this soon.

Kazooless

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/174761#Comment_174761

Has there been any movement from Logos on fixing this yet?

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/200972#Comment_200972

No! It is still a Proposal on the Metadata page.

David Sloan

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/201066#Comment_201066

Sorry to bring this up again, but why do we still not have original publication dates? Is Logos never going to do anything about this? I can understand if they want to keep the publication date the same, but if it's a translation of a work that was originally written in 1550, I would like to have some way of sorting by publication date. Perhaps a new field needs to be added that would be different than the publication date for resources like this?

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/577645#Comment_577645

Perhaps a new field needs to be added that would be different than the publication date for resources like this?

There are a number of fields that various Logos users would like to see added. We have no way of knowing if Logos intends to add them or, if they do, when. The easiest solution is not to depend upon Logos but to enter these fields oneself in the tags area. The current release candidate shows that Logos has now made that easier for us to do.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/577645#Comment_577645

Sorry to bring this up again, but why do we still not have original publication dates? Is Logos never going to do anything about this? I can understand if they want to keep the publication date the same, but if it's a translation of a work that was originally written in 1550, I would like to have some way of sorting by publication date. Perhaps a new field needs to be added that would be different than the publication date for resources like this?

Bob Pritchett said in August that they have plans to add more metadata fields so they can keep track separately of the original publication date and the publication date of the digital edition: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/73779/514647.aspx#514647

But I suspect that is still a long way off.