Suggestion (general): Allow multiple libraries

Perseus has just about doubled my resource count (if I don't have them all yet, it may still reach that). The situation is almost beyond hope in the mobile space right now, but even on the desktop, this many resources is painful. Everything is slower and much more difficult to manage. And I expect (hope) that Logos will be releasing more collections like Perseus as time goes on (though perhaps not free).

I don't know if this would work for everyone, but I think it would be very helpful to have multiple libraries. Hiding resources isn't an answer - too painful and not dynamic enough. Well-defined collections isn't, either, since all the library, searching, and indexing overhead of the full-sized library is still an issue. But if I could switch libraries and manage which resources are in which, that would be excellent. I know I couldn't search across, for example, both all my N.T. Greek stuff and Perseus (if they were in separate libraries). But that might be a price I'm willing to pay for a better experience in my normal usage. Or perhaps one library was small and focused on normal usage and the other included everything (assuming a resource could be in multiple libraries). This could also be leveraged to make the mobile experience better.

Anyway, that's one idea on how to improve the everyday experience in Logos when one has a very large set of resources.

Thanks,

Donnie

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Keep Smiling 4 Jesus :)

Observation: can have many Logos 4 installations that do have different library content, forum discussion may be helpful => Is there a Logos 4 lite?

Other option: use wiki quick installation to scan desired resource files into Logos 4 installation(s) with automatic download turned off.

Keep Smiling [:)]

David Paul

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/294395#Comment_294395

I have been awol lately (2-3 months) due to a series of software issues that finally culminated in a HD replacement. Good news is I now run 64 rather than 32 bit OS. But having downloaded both the L4 core and my entire library on a couple of different occasions during this time, there is more than enough evidence in my recent experience to belie the idea that L4 is a program "that can run on virtually any computer you use". Sure...in theory...if you have a 2-3 day investment of time to kill while downloading and indexing just to get to the place where you can use it on any given computer.

What I would like is the ability to download a sleek version of my library while on the run that consists of the dozen or so resources of my library that constitute the bread and butter of my daily usage. 2-4 Bibles, 6-8 lexicons of various stripes, and 1-2 other things...and my notes...especially my notes. Is this even a possibility? Or must I deal with the current all or nothing scenario that makes the supposed notion of "portability" almost a cruel joke?

George Somsel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/294400#Comment_294400

I have been awol lately (2-3 months) due to a series of software issues that finally culminated in a HD replacement. Good news is I now run 64 rather than 32 bit OS. But having downloaded both the L4 core and my entire library on a couple of different occasions during this time, there is more than enough evidence in my recent experience to belie the idea that L4 is a program "that can run on virtually any computer you use". Sure...in theory...if you have a 2-3 day investment of time to kill while downloading and indexing just to get to the place where you can use it on any given computer.

What I would like is the ability to download a sleek version of my library while on the run that consists of the dozen or so resources of my library that constitute the bread and butter of my daily usage. 2-4 Bibles, 6-8 lexicons of various stripes, and 1-2 other things...and my notes...especially my notes. Is this even a possibility? Or must I deal with the current all or nothing scenario that makes the supposed notion of "portability" almost a cruel joke?

While I can't agree with you that it takes 2-3 days to download and index the program and resources (including notes) since I did this a few months ago when I got a new computer, I think your idea has some merit. I can envision temporarily installing Logos on someone else's computer when away from your own (then removing it when finished). Having a streamlined version would be helpful for such occassions.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/294400#Comment_294400

I would like this possibility too. Wouldn't need to have the whole Perseus library on my laptop (and perhaps a bunch of other things) as I don't do any of the serious research on that, just devotional reading and some word studies and dictionary lookups. Might want to define a "Reading Library" which I'd bring with me on my tablet for reading on airplanes and such, which would have, say, only Bibles and Vyrso books and the Harvard Classics Fiction works.

DominicM

Everything is slower and much more difficult to manage.

That was my fear I had >4k resources before perseus, and >5.5k now, however even on my 3yr old netbook (single core atom 1.6ghz) my searches only take a couple of extra seconds to execute

Hiding resources isn't an answer - too painful and not dynamic enough. Well-defined collections isn't, either, since all the library, searching, and indexing overhead of the full-sized library is still an issue.

I think we will need to agree to disagree on this, a well defined collection IS what you need, it doent sound exciting, but its powerful.

Indexing though a pain, is a rarity, once its indexed its indexed

the searching time savings, using well defined collections is awesome, at least it helps me on my old laptop..

I would not want a seperate library, thats my 2c

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/294419#Comment_294419

I would not want a seperate library, thats my 2c

For me it would be an issue of more limited hard disk space on my laptop or tablet, not the indexing speed.

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/294422#Comment_294422

FYI from my installations of Logos I don't see any performance issue from the install of Perseus. I have almost 11,000 resources now, and I originally benchmarked searches against entire library for generic words and it added a second or two - in fact it appears to be linear, search is slowed by the same percentage as the number of books added. Indexing looks the same to me when a single, or few resources are added. I make heavy use of Collections and tagging to easily narrow down my library when I want to, or I give thought to the right types of searches to use to find things.

My total installation of "all that is Logos" (resources, indices, etc. ) is 43 GB now, which in the days where even laptops have 500GB disks and 256GB solid state disks are affordable, frankly just isn't an issue. I sure wouldn't want Logos to invest a ton of time finding ways to make that footprint 36 GB for example, thereby depriving us of a boatload of new software features that would not happen if Logos spent their time getting a 15% improvement on old computers.

I realize that many have older computers that, if on the borderline of having performance/capacity problems, may be struggling with the addition of the Perseus resources. This is not a new challenge on older computers, but Logos is very focused on bringing many more resources to its customers - don't we all want very large libraries with very sophisticated tools to use with those libraries? That's the future - and for customers that want to just have a small library, do so - or consider the computing needs of increasing your library size when you do that.

IMHO users of Logos need to always be thinking about the right type of computer to run Logos given the resources they want to use, and Logos' software improvements need to be refined to support very large libraries of resources (one day 10,000 will be average and many users will have 20,000 - 25,000 resources!!!!). This is why "hiding" resources is not a very practical approach to managing one's library; collections, tagging, more sophisticated search tools, and whatever new things Logos can dream up to help us effectively use very large libraries is the way to go.

My .02.

Donnie Hale

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/294395#Comment_294395

Observation: can have many Logos 4 installations that do have different library content, forum discussion may be helpful => Is there a Logos 4 lite?

Other option: use wiki quick installation to scan desired resource files into Logos 4 installation(s) with automatic download turned off.

Multiple installations wasn't a consideration in my request (though I do have them). I work primarily from one main desktop, so managing that isn't realistic.

For others in the thread who commented on appropriate hardware, I have a quad core i7 with 6GB RAM and multiple 1TB drives plus very fast Radeon graphics. The hardware isn't the issue.

Question about the Logos collections feature: Does each collection get its own index? I don't believe that's the case. So while collections may make managing aspects of the library easier and provide implicit bounds on searches, the overall index size still impacts search performance.

As a longtime software developer (23+ years), I understand that it's better to express what you want to have for dinner (significantly better library management capabilities such that library and corresponding index sizes don't get in the way of everyday work) than to give the recipe (allow for multiple libraries). Despite the responses so far, I stand by my request.

Thanks,

Donnie

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/294464#Comment_294464

For others in the thread who commented on appropriate hardware, I have a quad core i7 with 6GB RAM and multiple 1TB drives plus very fast Radeon graphics. The hardware isn't the issue.

Donnie, your original post said that due to the extra resources "Everything is slower". You do have a very-fast computer. Can you offer some specifics of searches or other operations that you now see as unacceptably slow, with the timings you are seeing, so we can benchmark the same and see what we are talking about? There are a lot of reasons for poor performance, a good first step would be to see if your examples are seen by others with comparable hardware.

Hayedid

I agree. "Library Management" in Logos is simply horrible. For example, I'm interested in bidding on the "Islamic Texts", but there is no way I want these to enter my 'normal' library and there are authors with whom I disagree and I would like to remove their books from my 'normal' library, but still be able to get to them and search them on a rare occassion. This includes books such as U.S. Constitution and others that generally don't apply to my Bible Studies. In addition, my Children use my Logos software and I would like for them to be able to use a pre-defined set of resources. It would make me feel more comfortable and give them a smaller set of books to search, manage, and try to understand.

I recently added some free set of 1000+ books including the Illiad, etc. My library is now so overwhelming that I don't even use Logos anymore.

toughski

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/319842#Comment_319842

Donnie,
I believe what you really want is Stellar Library Management.

Let's
face it - Logos' rhyme and reason for making collections does not fit all
users. We all have many titles we want to hide and many we want gone.

I
am not talking about removing 1 resource at a time. C'mon Logos! Let us delete
entire collections, or even entire library minus 8-10 resources (what David
talked about) while still retaining our license in case we want them back in
the future...

Bob
Pritchett made an argument that users "forget" that they
"deleted" a resource and have to call CS. I call this poor
implementation. Let's think about the design which would save Logos' phone
support and get users what they need. Maybe a triple opt-out dialog "are
you cross-your-heart sure you want to delete this useless resource?"...

Maybe
a way to reduce this problem and save Logos money in support costs, is to
increase the functionality of the "You do not have this resource, but you
could" panel. If a user clicks on a resource that they have hidden then
give them a panel that says "You have this resource, but have chosen to
hide it. If you want to have access to that resource again click here."
Now do the "unhide" form them and tell them to restart Logos.

What
we really need is flexibility:

Have multiple Library skins: Spreadsheet, pretty
shelf, …
Sorting by Collections,
Automatically generated "Recently Read
Resources" maybe “Last downloaded”,” Vyrso only”, PB only, HIDDEN/DELETED;
“other people also bought xyz resources” with a custom discount offer …
What about sorting by index a resource supports
- definitely useful for collection management
perfect resource metadata
What about sorting by 2 or more columns – First,
Mytags in descending order, then Authors,
then titles…
What about the same system they have on the
website: drill down by several categories, not related to one another and your
library displays a number of "hits"
- Christian Living > Prayer > Men, or Preaching>Grace>Lloyd Jones
Move “Hiding” feature into the Library, where it
belongs
potentially allow "Hiding/deleting" to be a per/machine setting. I can see a reason to only have a dozen resources on my travel Laptop while retaining the entire library on office computer.
Allow
sorting, searching for hidden books.

MyTags:

Ability to share mytags
Once a user created a
tag – let it be autocompleted in the future when user starts to type the same
few letters (this can be turned off in Program Settings) so they are easier to
manage (less misspelled tags, faster tagging, etc.)
Allow user to rename a Mytag, which would automatically propagate to all resources tagged with that mytag

FOR MULTIPLE RESOURCES
SELECTED: Currently user can only delete ALL mytags from several selected
resources. Allow Display of all used
mytags (some of them will be bold – they are present in all selected resources;
some of them will be grey – they are used in only some of selected resources)
and allow simple on-off deletion/addition

Prioritize
view:

Allow insertion of
horizontal “divider” lines for logical
organization
Even better - provide
headings for the prioritization groups - Bible, Bible commentary, English
dictionaries, Lectionaries etc. ... a heading for each group we might want to
prioritize

please note that I copied many suggestions from multiple users in other posts and do not take credit for them

Donnie, what are the advantages of having multiple libraries versus suggestions provided above?

Mark Barnes

When I first read Donnie's post I didn't think it was a very good idea. But on reflection, he may have a point - and it needn't be too complex to implement at the UI level at least. All it would require would be a big obvious option that said "Limit all operations to resources in xxxxx collection". All resources outside of that collection would automatically (and temporarily) disappear from searches, collections, parallel resources, right-click menus, etc. It could be quite useful to me, for example, when I switch between academic work and church work.

That said, I do think the existing system works well. As Dominick has pointed out, a large library scales pretty well (so long as you have a decent amount of RAM). I don't believe the proposal would make that much difference with regard to speed. only to convenience of usage.

toughski

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/319912#Comment_319912

That said, I do think the existing system works well. As Dominick has pointed out, a large library scales pretty well (so long as you have a decent amount of RAM). I don't believe the proposal would make that much difference with regard to speed. only to convenience of usage.

Actually, I think having multiple libraries on the same machine would hurt performance - many resources will have to be indexed multiple times, taking MORE time overall and wasting space.

However, allowing hiding on "per-machine" basis will be awesome, because it gives the user opportunity to leverage PC specs to best mach size of library on a particular machine to his or her needs. In this scenario, Logos' servers will have the Master Licence copy and each machine will store it's own licence list of what this PC should download

QUESTION: Do you think it is a viable solution? Will LOGOS go for it?

I don't know if this would work for everyone, but I think it would be very helpful to have multiple libraries

Donnie, you are a genius! It just dawned on me that we don't need multiple "libraries" on the same computer, we need multiple "views" of one Library:

THE Library will display all of the resources you own, which will match your licence (including "hidden" - they will be greyed out, but still will be searchable, taggable and sortable. They can have an easy "Unhide" button)
Users could create a limited amount of "views", such as "Active" (for a lack of the better word) - it will track Everything minus the "hidden" resources
Collections "view" would replace current Collections Tool
...

Martin Horn

I agree with this idea completely.

Martin Horn

Donnie Hale

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/320307#Comment_320307

Donnie, you are a genius! It just dawned on me that we don't need multiple "libraries" on the same computer, we need multiple "views" of one Library

Sometimes it takes folks a while to catch up to me. Actually, your description of multiple views is a better expression of what I was envisioning.

However, since my original post, I've thought about it some more and seen some other posts related to the topic which have given me another idea (or perhaps re-proposing something close to what I think has been proposed elsewhere):

Allow us to manage all our owned resources (avoiding the term "library" here) online, i.e. a web interface into the cloud of our resources. The first thing I'd like to do via such an interface is define which resources get downloaded to which devices. If you have any Kindle books, you know that on Amazon's site you can manage all the different Kindle devices / platforms to which your resources can be sent.

For my main workstation, I'd have everything (perhaps excepting Perseus - which goes to the "multiple views" concept). On my laptop, I'd have a much smaller subset - just what I need when I'm working from it, which is especially when I'm on campus at seminary (most of my classes being taken online). For my iPad, I'd want to set some resources as downloaded, some as "available if online", and the rest as not available (since resource browsing and management is horrible right now and will likely never be awe-inspiring).

Anyway, my latest $.02 ...

Donnie

DominicM

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/320361#Comment_320361

your description of multiple views is a better expression of what I was envisioning.

isnt this what we are doing by making custom collections?

Donnie Hale

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/320771#Comment_320771

isnt this what we are doing by making custom collections?

What I want by "multiple libraries" or "multiple views" is to have the effect that, for the time I'm using a particular library/view, Logos essentially has no knowledge of any other resource I own. As if I didn't own resources not in that library or view or that they're hidden (to the degree that in today's Logos those are functionally equivalent).

Donnie

DominicM

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/320802#Comment_320802

you are aware you can search ONLY within specific collections, alowing Logos to forget the other resources??

maybe whats you want is a filter on the libray view to only show books in X collection... otherwise I cant see/understand what your asking for

maybe I am just being thick this morning

Carl Sanders

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/320895#Comment_320895

I requested something similar in person a while back. I was especially thinking it would be helpful for teaching situations. When I do an in-class demo, it would be nice to have an installation/library visible for the students that looks more like theirs (Scholar's) rather than mine (Portfolio w/ a ton of other things). While I can do everything in principle, when I discuss a "whole library" search vs. a collection search, my "whole library" doesn't look anything near what they get (and there are a few other similar situations). Also, when I do assignments, it would be helpful to have an easy way to mimic what they see on the screen. It would have some value (and be easier for this purpose), though not a deal-breaker.

Note: I realize that students who have upgraded or added other items will be different so that this would never be perfect. But at least everyone with the assigned package would see what I show. They might see more, but I don't think that's a big issue to explain.