Organizing Library

My grief comes from knowing that I have a lot of books and not being able to place my hands on them when needed since my library is not very organized.

That is what moved me toward collections. I have about 150 of them (I have over 3,000 Logos resources, however).

The syntax to create collections isn't that hard to learn. On the wiki there are some good examples and tips. All collections cannot be dynamic. Sometimes the rules you'd need to create would take more time to create than just dragging resources one at a time to the Plus These Resources pane.

I have a collection of commentaries that are what I (and others) might consider the top commentaries on each book of the Bible. This collection combines tagging and dynamic rules. I manually rate the commentaries with 1-5 stars. In this case a 4-5 star commentary would make the cut. The syntax is simple:

type:commentary rating:>=4

That's it. Any time I add a commentary to my Library and tag it 4 or 5 it will join that collection.

I have a collection of books on Christian Living. I manually selected each of these and added them one at a time.

I have about six or seven collections of systematic theologies. Most are formed one book at a time, or with a syntax like the following:

type:monograph title:(theology, dogmatics) author:(Berkouwer, Hodge, Berkof, Buswell, Calvin, Culver, Grudem, "a Brakel", Shedd)

You can experiment with the syntax in Library view to see what you get before you try to build the collection.

Here is some help from the wiki: http://wiki.logos.com/Collections Note the supplemental links on that page.

I'd encourage you to work on this a bit at a time so you feel you can locate the resources you want. It has paid back the time I've spent on it.

I've used collections very little.  I'll read up on how to do collections and try this approach. It seems that collections required a lot of conditional statements that did not come naturally to me.   My grief comes from knowing that I have a lot of books and not being able to place my hands on them when needed since my library is not very organized.

Thanks

Collections don't necessarily require a lot of conditional statements.  In fact, if you want you can simply open your library and drag them one by one into the "Plus these resources" area (though that tends to be the hard way).  You can enter a short "rule" to cut down the clutter and then drag the ones you don't want into the "Minus these resources" area.  Also, there are some simple "conditions" which you can set up.  I have one collection of Barth's works for which I typed in the "rule" of "Church Dogmatics" and dragged everything which wasn't in the collection into the "Minus" area.  Having collections makes searching easier.  I understand that L4 searches fastest if you simply let it search the entire library, but I don't necessarily want the fastest.  Sometimes I simply don't want to be required to search through the search results to find what I want so collections narrows it down to the area of interest so that I don't need to look through the hits for lots of works I'm not interested in.

Mark also has a way to upload your library so that you see see the books better.  How you tried that?

I haven't seen that, so I am not quite sure what you mean.

If you have any specific collections you would like to create, let us know, and we will try to help you with the syntax. I would rather assist you than create them for you. You probably know the old adage: "Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime."