Creating a collection of biographies

I am trying to create a collection of biographies. I tried the suggestion on the Wiki (https://wiki.logos.com/Example_Collections):

type:(monograph, dictionary) AND subject:biography ANDNOT (subject:(“Jesus Christ”, Bible, Apostles))

But this is too narrow and excludes many good biographies in my Logos library, including the fine biography of J. I. Packer, which is a free Faithlife ebook. For some reason, this book has no Subject tags. When I just entered "biography" the list grows, but it still does not pick up the Packer biography.

I ended up just going with this rule for the collection:

subject:biography ANDNOT (subject:(“Jesus Christ”, Bible, Apostles))

I manually added J. I. Packer: An Evangelical Life and Handbook of Evangelical Theologians. This collection includes Christian History Magazine which is useful for this collection.

But I still suspect I might be missing some biographies.

Does anyone have a better idea for a reliable rule for an automatic collection of biographies?

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop App

Comments

Simon’s Brother

FL eBooks are not tagged with subject metadata so a rule like this will not pick them up. You either need to create a rule that looks at the title or add your own tag and create a rule around that tag if you want to pick up FL eBooks in collections or add them manually to the collection.

I am trying to create a collection of biographies. I tried the suggestion on the Wiki (https://wiki.logos.com/Example_Collections):

type:(monograph, dictionary) AND subject:biography ANDNOT (subject:(“Jesus Christ”, Bible, Apostles))

But this is too narrow and excludes many good biographies in my Logos library, including the fine biography of J. I. Packer, which is a free Faithlife ebook. For some reason, this book has no Subject tags. When I just entered "biography" the list grows, but it still does not pick up the Packer biography.

I ended up just going with this rule for the collection:

subject:biography ANDNOT (subject:(“Jesus Christ”, Bible, Apostles))

I manually added J. I. Packer: An Evangelical Life and Handbook of Evangelical Theologians. This collection includes Christian History Magazine which is useful for this collection.

But I still suspect I might be missing some biographies.

Does anyone have a better idea for a reliable rule for an automatic collection of biographies?

NB.Mick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1074597#Comment_1074597

FL eBooks are not tagged with subject metadata so a rule like this will not pick them up. You either need to create a rule that looks at the title or add your own tag and create a rule around that tag if you want to pick up FL eBooks in collections or add them manually to the collection.

So true. And the other rule relies exclusively on the subject tags - thus it will miss all that are improperly tagged, as well as cases like Farrar's fictionalized biography of Chrysostomos, which the resource info describes as a biography, but the subject reads fiction. The title doesn't help there, either.

I try to tag eBooks and other items in my library as "biography" when I come across them - and since others do the same, a good idea for casting the net wide is to run tag:bio and see from there.

Combining both rules would look like this: (subject:biography ANDNOT (subject:(“Jesus Christ”, Bible, Apostles))) OR tag:bio

Harry Hahne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1074597#Comment_1074597

FL eBooks are not tagged with subject metadata so a rule like this will not pick them up.

I noticed that the new Packer book had no Subject tags, but I assumed this was an error that would eventually be corrected. I did not realize that all of the eBooks had no subject tags.

Is there any way to see a list of all of the Faithlife eBooks in my library? I tried filtering my Library with "ebook", but I don't know if that is reliable. If the Faithlife eBooks are treated differently than Logos books (such as no subjects), I would like to manually tag them. At any rate, I don't want them to get buried under 5300 books in Logos.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1074673#Comment_1074673

Is there any way to see a list of all of the Faithlife eBooks in my library? I tried filtering my Library with "ebook", but I don't know if that is reliable.

Use edition:ebook. If you include Edition in Library Details View, you can see the values it has.

Harry Hahne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1074682#Comment_1074682

Use edition:ebook. If you include Edition in Library

Perfect. Thanks.

I see that Edition can be Logos, eBook, Facimile or User Created. That helps me distinguish which books came from Logos and which came from Faithlife eBooks.

I had assumed that the edition would be something like "Second", "revised", etc. Is that information included anywhere in the resource information fields?

Simon’s Brother

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1074688#Comment_1074688

Use edition:ebook. If you include Edition in Library

Perfect. Thanks.

I see that Edition can be Logos, eBook, Facimile or User Created. That helps me distinguish which books came from Logos and which came from Faithlife eBooks.

I had assumed that the edition would be something like "Second", "revised", etc. Is that information included anywhere in the resource information fields?

Agree the field name edition is a little misleading when you consider the plain meaning of it within the context of books - IMHO format, while not totally innocent of possible confusion, would have been a more meaningful field nam, particularly in the context of computer files.

There is not a specific field that indicates the ‘edition’ of the book as you and I understand it. This information is often included in the title field and/or the description field.

Ideally I would like to have a true ‘edition‘ field along with a volume field. Even with Logos books at times combining multiple volumes into one field it would still be useful if it said Vol. 1-5 for instance or Books 5-9 as the case may be and could be used for sorting purposes along with identification purposes, particularly helpful for those with larger libraries.