making personal books searchable
I have tried to find this answer on the forums and also on the wiki and I'm having trouble locating it.
I have made some personal books and yet when I search in the Passage guide for a bible reference that I know is in the personal book, it still doesn't show up in the search results. Can anyone tell me why this is so? Do I have to put milestones in manually at each Bible reference? I want to be able to use the passage guide to find material in my personal books.
I have checked to make sure that my personal book is included in a collection that the passage guide searches so that isn't the issue.
Any help?
Theological Reflection with Practical Application
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bryan jay said:
Do I have to put milestones in manually at each Bible reference?
It depends on what sort of personal book you're creating. If you're creating a commentary, and you want it to show in the commentaries section of the Passage Guide then:
- You have to set the type of the personal book to "Bible Commentary".
- You have to manually put milestones in at each Bible reference,
If you're creating a normal book, and you want it to show in the Collections section of the Passage Guide, then you just need to add it to an a appropriate collection.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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I don't understand, Mark. I don't see a "collections" section of the passage guide. Let's say the personal book is simply a sermon that includes several Bible references. One of the references is 1 Chronicles 17:2. All I did was a very basic Personal Book with no milestones, but Logos automatically recognizes the bible references, correct?
If I do a passage guide search on 1 Chronicles 17:2, the book does not show up anywhere in the passage guide. I tried this in the standard passage guide, but also in my custom one, which I call "My passage guide". In this custom passage guide, I have a collection of commentaries, and I made sure the book was categorized as a commentary, and I also prioritized it just to make sure it would show up, but it doesn't.
Theological Reflection with Practical Application
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bryan jay said:
I don't understand, Mark. I don't see a "collections" section of the passage guide. Let's say the personal book is simply a sermon that includes several Bible references. One of the references is 1 Chronicles 17:2. All I did was a very basic Personal Book with no milestones, but Logos automatically recognizes the bible references, correct?
If I do a passage guide search on 1 Chronicles 17:2, the book does not show up anywhere in the passage guide. I tried this in the standard passage guide, but also in my custom one, which I call "My passage guide". In this custom passage guide, I have a collection of commentaries, and I made sure the book was categorized as a commentary, and I also prioritized it just to make sure it would show up, but it doesn't.
Bryan, you can add collections to your passage guide. Here you can see that I have added several of my collections to my passage guide. Just drag "collection" over to the guide, and then select which collection you want to include.
If you would like this PB to show with your commentaries, then you will need to add the milestones to it, and compile it as a commentary. The commentary section looks for milestones - not references.
I hope this helps.
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bryan jay said:
I don't see a "collections" section of the passage guide.
You can add a Collections section to a custom passage guide.
bryan jay said:Let's say the personal book is simply a sermon that includes several Bible references.
There are two ways in Logos can look up references in any Logos resource:
- In the Commentaries section of a passage guide, Logos looks for sections in resources that deal specifically with that passage. The milestones tell Logos that a particular section deals with a particular passage.
- In the Collections section of a passage guide, Logos looks for any reference to the passage anywhere in the resource. Milestones aren't needed.
If Logos didn't require milestones in the commentary section, then the commentary section would be filled to bursting with irrelevant material. Imagine how many commentaries on other books of the Bible mention John 12, for example. You wouldn't want those cluttering up your Commentaries section when researching John 12. But the number of commentaries that have a milestone of John 12 is much more limited, and provide the results you're looking for.
You can get the best of both worlds by adding books you know are relevant (such as your sermons PB) to a collection, and then add the collection section to the PG.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Hey Mark Barnes,
While this question is not particularly a part of this thread. Do you have a method you use to synthesis all of the various ways Logos allows your to catalog your research? In other words, what is your note taking methodology and how do you catalog your research so that when you need it, you can readily locate it. Thanks in advance
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Orpheus Heyward said:
In other words, what is your note taking methodology and how do you catalog your research so that when you need it, you can readily locate it.
A major part of my strategy is "don't organise, search", which Logos obviously makes possible. In other words, I try not to spend time cataloging or organising data that I can subsequently easily find again.
But when I need to take detailed notes, my methodology is explained in this note-taking video I made a few years ago: http://www.logosbiblesoftwaretraining.com/other-videos/preparing-a-sermon-with-logos-4/#vimeo-8312956
You might want to skip forward to about 7:25.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark! Yay! I got it to work. The problem was that in my custom passage guide, I had defined my collection "sermons" as a "commentary" section. For the benefit of others who may also get confused on this point... you have to be careful that when you customize your passage guide, even though you may put a "collection" from your library into the guide, make sure that the "section type" (from the list on the left of the guide template) is set also to collection and not to commentaries or something else.
Theological Reflection with Practical Application
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Mark, may I ask a follow-up question? I was experimenting with personal books in the first place not primarily to put my sermons in Logos but for my notes. I'm still working on the long arduous task of moving note files from my old Bible Works program over to Logos. I am using Logos' notes capability for this. In addition, I've already added a fairly large number of my own notes, which in some cases are verse by verse and almost on the level of a personal commentary on the book I'm studying.
What concerns me is that no one knows the future, and I don't want all this work lost or made inaccessible or difficult to transfer to some other format. Because Logos won't export my notes, I'm considering using Personal Books to do the same function.
Let me describe my situation and if you would be so kind as to offer advice I would appreciate it. I currently make a notes file with book name and chapter number (e.g.: John 1). I then make my notes on either individual verses or groups of verses within that chapter. So for example, I might have 30 notes in my John 1 file, some are tied to a single verse, others to a group of verses. These are meant to be permanent notes that I want to be able to read and then modify as I study that same passage in the future. Eventually I'll pass them on to my children when I die and hopefully they'll want to read them!
What appeals to me about Personal Books is that I would be able to have these notes in a more non-proprietary format for the future. However, I would be losing the ease of modification because I would have to recompile the book after each note modification.
Do you think it would work to have a personal book for each Bible book, labeled as a commentary and put milestones in for each individual verse? Once I had done this in Word, I would then only have to open Word when I'm taking notes, save the file and recompile the book. If I do this a little bit at a time, as I study the Bible, it doesn't seem that it would take too much extra effort, and I would still be able to access my thoughts on a given chapter, but I would just use the passage guide to do it rather than the notes function.
Any advice?
Theological Reflection with Practical Application
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bryan jay said:
Mark, may I ask a follow-up question? I was experimenting with personal books in the first place not primarily to put my sermons in Logos but for my notes. I'm still working on the long arduous task of moving note files from my old Bible Works program over to Logos. I am using Logos' notes capability for this. In addition, I've already added a fairly large number of my own notes, which in some cases are verse by verse and almost on the level of a personal commentary on the book I'm studying.
What concerns me is that no one knows the future, and I don't want all this work lost or made inaccessible or difficult to transfer to some other format. Because Logos won't export my notes, I'm considering using Personal Books to do the same function.
Let me describe my situation and if you would be so kind as to offer advice I would appreciate it. I currently make a notes file with book name and chapter number (e.g.: John 1). I then make my notes on either individual verses or groups of verses within that chapter. So for example, I might have 30 notes in my John 1 file, some are tied to a single verse, others to a group of verses. These are meant to be permanent notes that I want to be able to read and then modify as I study that same passage in the future. Eventually I'll pass them on to my children when I die and hopefully they'll want to read them!
What appeals to me about Personal Books is that I would be able to have these notes in a more non-proprietary format for the future. However, I would be losing the ease of modification because I would have to recompile the book after each note modification.
Do you think it would work to have a personal book for each Bible book, labeled as a commentary and put milestones in for each individual verse? Once I had done this in Word, I would then only have to open Word when I'm taking notes, save the file and recompile the book. If I do this a little bit at a time, as I study the Bible, it doesn't seem that it would take too much extra effort, and I would still be able to access my thoughts on a given chapter, but I would just use the passage guide to do it rather than the notes function.
Any advice?
I have thought about this, but I simply have collected too many notes over the years.
FYI... you can export your notes to MS Word (see screen prints).
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Bryan, what you describe is what I do. Just recently I tipped the 100,000 notes level. That sounds like a lot, but it's not; when I make a note, it's applied to multiple verses.
Also I have my Dad's notes (he was a minister for his lifetime). Plus I have others notes that have been shared on the internet. Plus I include some of the early 1900s translation notes (Darby, etc).
Also, I work with multiple Bible software platforms. So, for example, my notes go in Laridian PB as well as the Logos PB, even though they're coming from Accordance, my PageWhite reading, etc.
I don't see the recompile in Logos as that big an issue, since Logos is not where I write the notes anyway. Every now and then, I just go over to the PB tool and push the compile button while I'm watching TV. Since the PBs are pre-linked in my layouts, everything is nice and organized.
Another thing I do, is that obviously many things are not verse oriented and so not amenable to a commentary format. So I keep documents that are arranged by major subject, add as I go, and then again, compile to Laridian and Logos. This is very handy when pulling good articles from the internet.
One last thing, probably not useful to you maybe, but I do a lot of analytics on the hebrew and greek. The note function in Logos (and most Bible software platforms) really doesn't do justice to the various types of language analyses. Onesy-twosy just doesn't cut it. But PBs are great. In my Laridian PB the verse-based analytics are color coded to allow quick scanning of the syntactic patterns. The Logos PB doesn't allow background color coding yet
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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bryan jay said:
Let me describe my situation and if you would be so kind as to offer advice I would appreciate it.
The advantage of notes is that they are quick to enter, and can be attached to Bible verses or highlighting. But, as you say, they're less portable and more prone to loss. PBs are more durable, easier to backup, and easier to read afterwards — but it's not quite so quick to create them.
It sounds to me as though you're already clear in your own mind about what is best for your circumstances [:)].
bryan jay said:would have to recompile the book after each note modification.
That's only true if you need to see the results in Logos right away. It might not do any harm to make many edits, but only recompile once a week or so.
bryan jay said:Do you think it would work to have a personal book for each Bible book, labeled as a commentary and put milestones in for each individual verse?
Certainly, a bible commentary PB with milestones is likely to be best. Whether you do one PB or many is up to you, and perhaps depends on how lengthy your notes will be, and whether you're likely to work on different parts of the Bible at the same time. You probably don't want four or five files open in Word if you happen to be working in several Bible books.
In my experience, the limiting factor is Word, not Logos. Logos handles very large PBs with ease. I'm working on one PB that has 25 million words. It's horribly slow in Word, but Logos handles it just fine. But remember you can join multiple .docx files in one PB if you wish, so if you create separate files for each Bible book, you could join them together in Logos if you ever wanted to.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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