Organizing Your Theological Library
Good article (and it mentions Logos)
http://www.reformation21.org/articles/organizing-a-personal-theological-library.php
Director of Zoeproject
www.zoeproject.com
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Nice!
This part jumped out at me:
"4. Journal articles in Logos Bible Software. About 6500 items. (I could have entered hundreds more, but I skipped some that I didn't think I'd ever want to consult.)"Wow, that's a huge amount of work! I've been thinking I want to do this too, but would rather hire someone to do it than do it myself. And frankly, I think Logos should provide this level of granularity for us, so we can easily peruse our list of journal articles by title, author, subject, date; and restrict searches to just articles that match a certain criterion; or find all articles with some search term in the title. Basically I'd like to have the ATLA search engine inside Logos!0 -
Thanks for posting the link to this article. Very helpful. You might be interested to know that the author of the article (on the value of organizing your library) is Andrew Naselli, who is (or was?) D. A. Carson's Research Manager and the administrator of Themelios. He is also the author of Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology which is currently a Logos Pre-Pub scheduled to ship Nov.3rd. (http://www.logos.com/products/prepub/details/6490)Tony Thomas said:Good article (and it mentions Logos)
http://www.reformation21.org/articles/organizing-a-personal-theological-library.php
Darcy
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Thanks, Thomas. Useful.
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It must be nice to have a full-time research assistant with two PhDs.
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Never mind, we've got Logos - which must come a close second.
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I second that - fast accessbile ATLA type data would be a great addition and it would help make the data more useful.
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I have recently discovered a great way to organize my Logos Library that is finally helping me get a handle on what all I have in it. I've created a new class of tags called "Shelf" which corresponds to an imaginary physical shelf where I might put each book away if I had them in my physical library. In my physical library I've always organized my books by categories on shelves in bookcases. I've got a bunch of shelves for my commentaries, a few shelves for theology, a shelf or two for church history, a whole bookcase for spirituality including prayer and the spiritual classics), a shelf for biography, a half shelf for Bibles, and so on. The key to making this work in Logos is that each book can only be on one shelf. I know there are great uses of tags and collections where there can be overlaps. But the way I get to know my physical library is by perusing it regularly and really becoming familiar with what is on each shelf. So I've started carving my Logos library into shelves. It's fun. It's like opening up all my boxes of books after a move (or more like after they've been in storage for a while and I haven't seen them) and getting to lovingly go through them again and arrange them on shelves, stopping to browse a couple of them here or there. A book can be moved from one shelf to another if I decide later that it makes more sense to have it with my theology books even though it might have quite a bit of biographical information in it about a particular theologian.
What this means is that the books I have already "shelved" I have a pretty good handle on. Some of them are easy to shelf en masse. All my commentary sets, for example, immediately got assigned the tag "Shelf: Commentaries-Sets" because I know what they are. But all the individual books I'm having to go through one by one and familiarize myself with them if I don't already know them, in order to decide what shelf they belong on. This is a really great exercise. I'm discovering some wonderful gems that I want to mark "TOREAD." I'm over halfway done with my library now, and I can sort/group by My Tags, scroll down to the section of tags that begin "Shelf: " and see all the shelves in my library, open them one by one and look at what's in them. It is very satisfying to see each shelf with only books that I am familiar with on it. In all my previous classification schemes (which I still have kept, for searching purposes) there were tons of books intermixed that I didn't know or that were of questionable quality. In my new scheme, I will know them all eventually, and the ones that are not of much use to me, I'll put off in some bookcase in the basement. (My Tag = "Shelf: Basement") [:)]
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That's a good idea, Rosie. Thanks for sharing.
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Rosie Perera said:
I have recently discovered a great way to organize my Logos Library that is finally helping me get a handle on what all I have in it. I've created a new class of tags called "Shelf" which corresponds to an imaginary physical shelf where I might put each book away if I had them in my physical library.
Rosie, I really like your creative way of using Logos. Thank you for sharing your library shelf system. I learned a lot.
Bohuslav
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