Suggestion: Bibliography-Based Resource Prioritization
Vote Here: Bibliography-Based Resource Prioritization | Logos
I think most of us can agree that resource prioritization could be improved within Logos.
My idea is simple: use bibliographies for resource prioritization.
Essentially, the resource prioritization philosophy would remain the same, except that you could add bibliographies into the resource prioritization list which would serve as dynamic placeholders for all the books listed in the bibliography. For those who didn't want to use bibliographies to help prioritize books, nothing would change.
To facilitate this, it would make sense to make a stand-alone prioritization tool so that you could drag and drop individual resources and sets from the Library as well as bibliographies from Documents.
The benefit of using bibliographies is that you can add notes reminding you why you like a particular commentary, why you tend to go to this commentary first, etc. If you are diligent about using bibliographies, you end up with a helpful document to share with others when they ask you what commentaries you found most helpful for a particular book of the Bible, when you might otherwise have forgotten. Thus, this method of prioritization would encourage good practices.
If you decide to implement this idea, if you want to draw more attention to the usefulness of bibliographies, you could refresh them with some additional features, such as:
- Hover to see the cover image
- Show/hide notes option
- Sort alphabetically/sort by title option.
(It would also be nice if the notes on a specific book could be tagged to that book and show up in the Library next to your rating, but I can suggest that elsewhere).
Theoretically, this could work with collections as well as bibliographies, although I don't know if collections have a default order.
Comments
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For those who didn't want to use bibliographies to help prioritize books, nothing would change.
I wonder!!
To facilitate this, it would make sense to make a stand-alone prioritization tool so that you could drag and drop individual resources and sets from the Library as well as bibliographies from Documents.
Ok. That would make up for the limitations of the Bib. tool as you cannot import selected books in Library.
If you decide to implement this idea, if you want to draw more attention to the usefulness of bibliographies, you could refresh them with some additional features, such as:
- Hover to see the cover image
- Show/hide notes option
- Sort alphabetically/sort by title option.
What happened to the "stand-alone prioritization tool" as you are now back to enhancing Biblios!?
I will stay with the "stand-alone prioritization tool" which will have to be a greatly enhanced Biblio tool with some of the features you suggested:-
- Hover to see the cover image - OK
- Show/hide notes option - OK
- Sort alphabetically/sort by title option - this needs some more attention
When you use "Save as a Bibliography", books from a Collection are sorted by Title! When you Add a collection, the books are placed at the bottom (presumably in Title order). And Biblio has a Sort by Author. But neither is useful to the order for Prioritization:-
- the tool needs to sort by Series and be able to use them as a group for Prioritization purposes
you could add bibliographies into the resource prioritization list which would serve as dynamic placeholders for all the books listed in the bibliography
This is the part that, like some bible prophecy, leaps unknowable steps from an enhanced Biblio tool to this part[:)]
- you seem to indicate that a "sorted" biblio is added somewhere in the Prioritization list and then prioritized as usual (by series and title)
- how is this different from selecting books in Library and adding them in?
- how does it improve the process? What are "dynamic place holders"?
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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For those who didn't want to use bibliographies to help prioritize books, nothing would change.
I wonder!!
At minimum, all it would have to look like is this. Drag a Library window into its own pane. Open up the existing prioritization. Open Documents. Drag a Bibliography Document into the Resource Prioritization List. Resource prioritization already handles sets of books which stand in for individual books, so this would be little different.
The resulting list, instead of something like:
- NKJV
- NASB 95
- Scrivener 1881
- LGNTI:SBL
- LHI
- LHB
- BHS
- BDAG
- HALOT
- NIDOTTE
- NIDNTTE
- A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament
- Handbooks on the New Testament | 3 Volumes
- Handbooks on the Old Testament | 4 Volumes
- PNTC Jn
- ZECNT John
- An Exposition of John
- John
- NICNT Jn
- A Commentary on Micah
- The Prophecy of Isaiah
- Studies in the Book of Psalms
- JMB Ps 1
- A Brief Explication of the Psalms
- etc.
would look something more like:
- NKJV
- NASB 95
- Scrivener 1881
- LGNTI:SBL
- LHI
- LHB
- BHS
- Hebrew Lexicons Bibliography | 4 Volumes
- Greek Lexicons Bibliography | 5 Volumes
- A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament
- Handbooks on the New Testament | 3 Volumes
- Handbooks on the Old Testament | 4 Volumes
- PNTC Jn
- John Bibliography | 13 Volumes
- A Commentary on Micah
- The Prophecy of Isaiah
- Psalms Bibliography | 20 Volumes
- etc.
Note that you can still have individual resources in the list. Therefore, the behavior would not change for those who didn't want to use bibliographies. Also, the behind-the-scenes prioritization logic would be the same since the new list would still resolve itself into a long list of individual books.
To facilitate this, it would make sense to make a stand-alone prioritization tool so that you could drag and drop individual resources and sets from the Library as well as bibliographies from Documents.
Ok. That would make up for the limitations of the Bib. tool as you cannot import selected books in Library.
I don't quite understand this, as I don't think it needs a standalone prioritization tool. That would be a nice-to-have, but certainly far from necessary.
If you decide to implement this idea, if you want to draw more attention to the usefulness of bibliographies, you could refresh them with some additional features, such as:
- Hover to see the cover image
- Show/hide notes option
- Sort alphabetically/sort by title option.
What happened to the "stand-alone prioritization tool" as you are now back to enhancing Biblios!?
Again, this is an additional but not necessary suggestion to Logos if they wanted to draw additional attention to Bibliographies as part of L11 improvements.
you could add bibliographies into the resource prioritization list which would serve as dynamic placeholders for all the books listed in the bibliography
This is the part that, like some bible prophecy, leaps unknowable steps from an enhanced Biblio tool to this part
- you seem to indicate that a "sorted" biblio is added somewhere in the Prioritization list and then prioritized as usual (by series and title)
- how is this different from selecting books in Library and adding them in?
- how does it improve the process? What are "dynamic place holders"?
Do the screenshots and additional explanation help?
When I say that the bibliography line-item in the resource prioritization list becomes a dynamic placeholder for the resources in that bibliography, I mean that if you decide to include that bibliography in the resource prioritization, then if in the future you change your bibliography, then the resource prioritization will be automatically updated to reflect that.
You could continue to do all your prioritizing in the Resource Prioritization pane. (In that case, nothing would change).
Or, you could create bibliographies for different categories, drag them into the Resource Prioritization list, and then if you wanted to change your prioritization you would edit your bibliography instead of the Resource Prioritization list. Essentially, you will end up spending less time in the resource prioritization tool and more time in your bibliographies.
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- you seem to indicate that a "sorted" biblio is added somewhere in the Prioritization list and then prioritized as usual (by series and title)
Exactly! That's the whole idea.
I may have confused some people about having an option to sort the bibliography alphabetically or by prioritization (which is what I meant). All I was thinking was that if you use bibliographies to determine resource prioritization, you need to have a set order based on priority. However, it might be nice if you could also view the bibliography alphabetically, which is how bibliographies usually are presented, without changing the prioritization order. Therefore, I was simply recommending a sort alphabetically/sort by priority viewing option. When you were in sort by priority view, you could drag and rearrange to change the priority. These priorities would be retained when viewing it sorted alphabetically.
- how is this different from selecting books in Library and adding them in?
It's not that different. Adding a bibliography would be similar to adding a set of commentaries. The Bibliography would be a placeholder for all the books it contained, thus simplifying the Resource Prioritization list by having only one line item for all the resources in the bibliography. Then, additionally, it would be easier to interact with the bibliography where you can see the full title, add notes, etc.
- how does it improve the process? What are "dynamic place holders"?
I'm hoping I've already answered this to your satisfaction.
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The Bibliography would be a placeholder for all the books it contained, thus simplifying the Resource Prioritization list by having only one line item for all the resources in the bibliography.
I'm not sure whether this really was a simplification and whether I would want to use that. The in my opinion most relevant issue remains: we prioritize books (whether in groups or individually) whereas the program in reality prioritizes indexes.
Just for the record, a workaround for the grouping you'd like to see is available: assign the same series name to the books in your bibliography, then it will work as a commentary series now does.
Have joy in the Lord!
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I'm not sure whether this really was a simplification and whether I would want to use that. The in my opinion most relevant issue remains: we prioritize books (whether in groups or individually) whereas the program in reality prioritizes indexes.
The main benefit I see is that I look at the Resource Prioritization list and get totally lost. Not only does it take me time to figure out where all my commentaries on John are, it is difficult to figure out what a commentary is just by its title, which can be very generic (e.g., "The Gospel of John" and "John" - I knew what these were at one time, now I have no idea!). My resource prioritization is always out of date, whereas my bibliographies are much easier to work with, contain notes and rationale about why I liked a particular commentary, and are always up to date.
But, you are free to still not think the idea is worthwhile!
I don't quite understand your second point, but that is probably my own ignorance!
Just for the record, a workaround for the grouping you'd like to see is available: assign the same series name to the books in your bibliography, then it will work as a commentary series now does.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work. Say I have a bibliography for commentaries on John. I arrange them by priority in my bibliography. Now I assign a series name to all those commentaries. When I drag the series into the Resource Prioritization, there is no set order, which defeats the whole purpose of Resource Prioritization.
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I may have confused some people about having an option to sort the bibliography alphabetically or by prioritization (which is what I meant). All I was thinking was that if you use bibliographies to determine resource prioritization, you need to have a set order based on priority. However, it might be nice if you could also view the bibliography alphabetically, which is how bibliographies usually are presented, without changing the prioritization order.
This was the part that needed clarification. You can move titles around for prioritization but that would have to be preserved if you wanted to sort them differently. I also appreciate clarification of "dynamic place holders" (something about pictures vs. words!).
For Passage Guide I work with Collections for Commentaries, and I can prioritize easily as I use Personal Books as Headers in the List i.e. their titles match the Collection (and I have Headers for the other prioritization categories e.g. Bibles, Bible Dictionaries, Lexicons).
- The Collection has 351 volumes, but I don't Prioritize all of them
- The Collection is updated automatically when I tag new volumes
- The Series in the List are updated automatically by Logos
- But I have to manually prioritize a new Series and any new Volumes
To work with Bibliographies:
- I don't want multiple Biblios for the Collection
- The Biblio would need an option to group Series for Prioritization
- The Biblio would have to maintain Prioritization when I Add the Collection
- I have to update Biblio from the dynamically updated Collection
- Biblio would have to recognize volumes I don't want to Prioritize
Commentaries are the big challenge because of the many ways they can be grouped e.g. by bible book, by series, by PG type.. You can easily create Collections for Bibles, Encyclopedias, Lexicons etc. and convert to Biblios (rules could exclude ones you don't want to Prioritize).
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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