Organizing Library
In general I need some tips on better organizing my library. I use tags but still have a hard time organizing my library. I'm hoping someone will share a few ideas to better manage my library.
Thanks,
Chuck
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Chuck, what are you trying to accomplish? I use collections but tags will function in much the same way. An advantage to collections in Logos 4 is they can be set up to be dynamic so you don't have to handle every resource separately as you do with tagging.
What is causing you grief?
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Chuck said:
I'm hoping someone will share a few ideas to better manage my library.
You might also want to consult some of Mark Barnes' tutorial videos http://www.4-14.org.uk/logos/tutorial-videos#vimeo-16398719
The ones I have watched so far and of excellent quality, thorough, and east to follow.
BTW: they can also be downloaded as .mov files.
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Hi Chuck,
I am also doing a similar thing. I have so far split my library into the main segments of church history and then allocated the people I am particularly interested in for the period.
I've done this with collections (and tags). For most key authors I just get the collection to look at the author. But I also have a tag for each collection for those that are written by someone else (but has say quotes from the person).
I have a collection for each period (I settled on Ancient, Medieval, Reformation, Enlightenment, Modern (Old) and Modern. Where modern (Old) is pre WW2.
I then select just those people I am generally always interested in (e.g. Reformation = Calvin etc., Modern = Piper). You could broaden this to pick up you whole library of course - but I thought this would take too long. Also the main aim was to quickly see what my favorite people say.
Using the tips in Mark's videos I then group these into 3 groups Ancient (Ancient, Medieval), Old (Reformation, Enlightenment, Modern (Old)) and Modern.
I then set up a search for each of these (and dragged it to my toolbar) so that I can quickly see what any of my favorite people say on a given topic.
It took a few hours to set up but was well worth the effort.
I am also interested in other potential groupings to help organize the library
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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
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Is there one video that you found helpful? Mark has several hours of videos and none were titled organizing the library.
Thanks
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Jack,
Thanks for the tip. Mark also has a way to upload your library so that you see see the books better. How you tried that?
Thanks,
Chuck
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Chuck said:
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.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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I'm not as prolific as Mark in my collections - but agree ranking resources is very worthwhile.
I similarly use 4-5 for superb resources. 3 for pretty good resources. 2 for items I'm not sure about (i.e. not had time to look at the book at all and don't know the author). And 1 for items I don't really expect I'll look at - but at the same time don't want to ignore completely by choosing to do so in the options.
The collection of commentaries can then be added as a selection on a passage guide so only your very best come up. This really helps (and then using prioritization to further improve the order of the list).
I also created a grouping for 'sermons' which I find very helpful (once again in the passage guide), as I can then see any sermons that have been done on the passage I'm looking at. This was by tagging and creating a collection.
I just added about 1000 new titles as part of the Christmas special so I need to work on my organisation again. Particularly around books on Christian Living, ministry, life of Jesus, etc.
Mark, what are the 6/7 collections you have for systematic theologies? I have them all lumped into one at the moment - but would like a bit more of a breakdown if possible...
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Here's a screen shot. The stray one is "Theology, Biblical", the others are all systematic theology collections. "Theology, Systematic" is a combination of the others plus any that I might not have wanted in the specific ones.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Chuck said:
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."
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Jack Caviness said:
I haven't seen that, so I am not quite sure what you mean.
Here is the link Jack. It is a nice way to look at your books and has several uses. Here is the link.
"For the kingdom of God does not consist in words but in power"
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I made collections/tags based on the way Logos organizes them on the upgrade page.
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Combination of tags, ratings and collections will really help to organize your library. I consider having the combination of all those possibilities as one of the best things in Logos 4 (against the older version).
Bohuslav
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Jerry M said:
Here is the link Jack.
Thank you for the link. Mark says, "A 10Mb file could take around 7 minutes to upload" Under optimum conditions, that would take about 25 minutes for me to upload. I will probably pass. Besides, I keep adding new resources, so it would rapidly become obsolete.
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Mark A. Smith said:
Here's a screen shot. The stray one is "Theology, Biblical", the others are all systematic theology collections. "Theology, Systematic" is a combination of the others plus any that I might not have wanted in the specific ones.
Mark, this also caused me to look at my theology collection, which at the moment is a single collection with 177 resources. I would like to clean that up some. Is there a place I can go to see the theology books break down in your scheme?
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David P. Moore said:
Is there a place I can go to see the theology books break down in your scheme?
Actually many of the books in my big systematic theology collection deal with single subjects so are not full blown systematic theologies. For the collections based on differing 'perspectives' I used Grudem to sort how who was who (when I didn't know). The biggest collection is the Reformed one. (Seems Reformed theologians are always writing systematic theologies.) There are some lines crossed between Reformed and Baptist, since you can be both or not.
Here are my collection contents.
Baptist:
Dispensational:
Pentecostal:
Refomed:
Wesleyan:
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Super! Thanks. This gives me something to chew on for awhile!
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Mark
I saw that in your Reformed Collection was Brakel's "The Christian's reasonable service". I didn't find it on the Logos website? Where did you found it?
Thanks for answering!
Hans
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A.J. van den Herik said:
Brakel's "The Christian's reasonable service"
It was published years ago by E4 and is no longer available from them. Logos never carried the item.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Just curious... If Logos doesn't have the item, how did you get it in your library. I have an old CD of the Expositors Bible Commentary from Zondervan and would LOVE to get it into my Logos collection somehow.
Theological Reflection with Practical Application
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bryan jay said:
Just curious... If Logos doesn't have the item, how did you get it in your library. I have an old CD of the Expositors Bible Commentary from Zondervan and would LOVE to get it into my Logos collection somehow.
If it was ever compatible with Logos (even if sold by a 3rd party), and you still have it, you can access it in Logos4.
If your resource from Zondervan is not a Logos resource, then you don't have a license to view it in any version of Logos.
Help links: WIKI; Logos 6 FAQ. (Phil. 2:14, NIV)
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Chuck said:
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.
george
gfsomselיְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
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If this CD was based off the Pradis Engine you're out of luck. You'll have to purchase it in Logos format. Back when Zondervan announced their partnership with Logos there was a brief window up "upgrade pricing" but that's long since expired.
Prov. 15:23
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I just tried creating collections but I can't find how to save them. They simply don't show up the next time I go in. I am new to Logos and finding that the lack of user friendliness is the number one issue. I know someone who switched to another program for this very reason. Seriously, I can't even simply just list the books I have bought - I have to wade through the title of every single chapter. Do I really need to take up time watching videos just to use a program?
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Dean, after creating a title for the collection you are working on, Logos will automatically save it for you. The only way to delete a collection is to never name it. (Logos used to save a new collection every time you opened the collection feature, naming it 'unnamed collection' if you didn't assign it a name, but you could see how that could result in multiple empty collections by the same name [;)])
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Thanks Paul, you're right, found them. Sigh, I'll get the hang of this eventually!
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Paul,
Logos still saves collections without naming them:
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Choose Truth Over Tribe | Become a Joyful Outsider!0 -
Dean Furlong said:
I can't even simply just list the books I have bought - I have to wade through the title of every single chapter.
Dean -
Sorry you are having troubles. Learning new software, especially one as powerful as Logos, can be a challenge for sure. I think that you will find that Logos does have the ability to "simply just list the books" you have purchased... It is called the Library, and it is a powerful feature. Here, you can do many things, including prioritizing your resources. That way, your favorite commentaries and bibles will show up before others during searches.
macOS, iOS & iPadOS |Logs| Install
Choose Truth Over Tribe | Become a Joyful Outsider!0 -
alabama24 said:Dean Furlong said:
I can't even simply just list the books I have bought - I have to wade through the title of every single chapter.
Dean -
Sorry you are having troubles. Learning new software, especially one as powerful as Logos, can be a challenge for sure. I think that you will find that Logos does have the ability to "simply just list the books" you have purchased... It is called the Library, and it is a powerful feature. Here, you can do many things, including prioritizing your resources. That way, your favorite commentaries and bibles will show up before others during searches.
The library also has a Last Updated column that if you click on the column header it will sort your library by when new/updated works were added so you can double check that you got everything you ordered. Obviously if you just bought a base package this info won't help as everything will have been established at the same time but this can help as you add books in the future.
Prov. 15:23
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alabama24 said:
Paul,
Logos still saves collections without naming them:
good catch, I guess I meant to say Logos used to create an unnamed collection simply by opening the collection feature without adding any books or search definitions. I assume the unnamed collections you made actually had resources in them.
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I tried that, but like you I have the Earliest NT book and it frustratingly lists every MS separately rather than just listing the book. I tried the prioritize but it didn't seem to save - I will give it another shot. Yes, I'll be patient with it and start using the video tutorials - just a little frustrating to begin with, but I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.
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