Our Context

Ken McGuire

There are lots of books about the American context that I would like to see in Logos. Off the top of my head:

HR Niebuhr - The Kingdom of God in America

E. Becker - The Denial of Death

Robert Bellah - Habits of the Heart

Harold Bloom - The American Religion

Roof & McKinney - American Mainline Religion

Smith & Denton - Soul Searching

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Comments

Dennis Parish

Ken,

I am new to Logos and I would like to ask a question (not a challenge, just learning what Logos can do and how people use it [:)]):

What functionality do you gain from putting these books into Logos, rather than having them as pdfs or Vyrso ebooks?

Thanks.

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/324393#Comment_324393

Hi Dennis

What functionality do you gain from putting these books into Logos, rather than having them as pdfs or Vyrso ebooks?

Good question.

Ken may have specific answers to the books he is recommending so I'll comment generically.

As Vyrso books are visible in Logos and Logos books are visible in Vyrso it comes down to a question of the extra "functionality" of a Logos book. This can relate to morphological tagging of words, additional metadata (such as classifying whether a resource is a commentary, encyclopedia or something else - all Vyrso books are tagged as monographs) and the degree of linking to other resources.

These features - along with others - allow more extended searching and analysis of texts, grouping of resources in logically consistent sets or collections and more easier navigating from one resource to another.

So, I expect - but don't know, that one of the decision points for Logos in the future as to whether they publish resources in Logos or Vyrso format will take these sort of criteria into account.

Also they get books provided in eBook format for Vyrso which makes it much easier for them to make the resources available.

Hope this helps - and goes some way towards addressing your question.

If I have misunderstood what you were asking, please post back.

Graham

NB.Mick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/324411#Comment_324411

Hi Dennis

What functionality do you gain from putting these books into Logos, rather than having them as pdfs or Vyrso ebooks?

Good question.

Ken may have specific answers to the books he is recommending so I'll comment generically.

As Vyrso books are visible in Logos and Logos books are visible in Vyrso it comes down to a question of the extra "functionality" of a Logos book. This can relate to morphological tagging of words, additional metadata (such as classifying whether a resource is a commentary, encyclopedia or something else - all Vyrso books are tagged as monographs) and the degree of linking to other resources.

Adding to Grahams helpful remarks, I think there is a significant difference between the two formats you provided as an alternative to Logos: pdf and Vyrso.

A pdf basically is something you can read on an electronic device and usually (not always) have the ability to search with a full-text search in your favorite pdf-reader. This is nice if one reads books from front to cover and occasionally wants to look up something in the respective resource (requires knowing that the information is in this resource and to click through many appearances of a found text string to get to the point of information).

A vyrso book (as Graham explained) is a logos resource with minimal tagging. However it is sitting in the Logos library and thus will be queried by the Logos search engine. If we want to execute a more complex search, like give me all instances in my library , where an author used "peace", "war", "justice" or "hunger" in connection with "church" and either "president" or "election" the search may yield a vyrso book as well as Logos ressources. We probably won't have known before that the topic of our search was treated in this specific book - and where. Thus Vyrso books are nearly the same as Logos monographs in terms of searchability (and you may add notes & highlights to it etc all ethe good stuff). However, a logos resource typically is tagged with links to other resources, which lacks in Vyrso. If the author of a Logos book says "as we can read from XYZ" and XYZ is an existing Logos resource, the text from this resource should be visible at mouse-over and if you click you are right in resource XYZ and can verify the cited source. Not so in Vyrso books, there only bible references are auto-tagged.

Thus, there is a good argument to have in the Logos library all resources that one could possibly want to research something in (thus some people try to convert their existing pdfs and other text-based resources into Logos books). The more a book is referencing other sources that are in Logos, the stronger the case to have it as a Logos resource as opposed to "only" a vyrso book. Same goes for books that are not monographs, but other formats (lexicons, grammars, lectionaries, calendar devotionals etc)

Mick

Ken McGuire

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/324393#Comment_324393

To be honest, I hadn't thought about Vyrso. That would probably be fine for me, as long as they can be link targets in Logos. PDF's, for all there advantages, would not be a good choice.