Question: Library of Early American History

I have a BIG general question- any advice on how best to integrate this resource, Library of Early American History, into my studies?

As an example if I'm reading Jonathan Edwards, Whitefield or Wesley and I'm interested in digging deeper into the culture of the time period is there a fairly simple way to locate relevant material from these resources?

More specifically is there a method to get these resources to work in a way that "Timeline" works pulling in these resources based on date giving cultural/historical context?

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Matthew C Jones

As an example if I'm reading Jonathan Edwards, Whitefield or Wesley and I'm interested in digging deeper into the culture of the time period is there a fairly simple way to locate relevant material from these resources?

Maybe you can create a collection by publisher and then search that collection.

Mark Smith

I am just beginning to explore this vast resource, so I, too, am exploring how to best use it.

First create a collection for just this group of resources. Use the Publisher as the selection criteria for your collection.

Second, the publication date seems to be the best way to access information around the time of the event, document, or persons you are interested in. You can sort by Publication Date and scroll. Within the collection you can also use pubdate: as a selection term. For example "pubdate:>1735 AND pubdate:<1750" will find the documents in the immediate time period of the beginning of The First Great Awakening. I see sermons by Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, George Whitefield, and Charles Chauncy (who opposed the awakening). Obviously there are secular documents from the same time period.

There is no way for us to insert anything into the Timeline. That's all up to Logos.

Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700713#Comment_700713

Is there a way to first do a collection of just all the resources called "Library of Early American History". I am asking because the first problem I have is knowing what is in the collection without looking at the pdf of all the resources. This set is massive, has been thrown into our libraries. How do I even know where to begin?

Gerard Shanley

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700713#Comment_700713

Thank you- very helpful suggestions.

Matthew C Jones

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700720#Comment_700720

Is there a way to first do a collection of just all the resources called "Library of Early American History". I am asking because the first problem I have is knowing what is in the collection without looking at the pdf of all the resources. This set is massive, has been thrown into our libraries. How do I even know where to begin?

Because of the size of this resource I don't know an easy way of doing that other than by publisher. The problem with that collection rule is there is another resource in Pre-Pub that would add another 25K documents to the collection.

Gerard Shanley

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700713#Comment_700713

Within the collection you can also use pubdate: as a selection term. For example "pubdate:>1735 AND pubdate:<1750" will find the documents in the immediate time period of the beginning of The First Great Awakening. I see sermons by Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, George Whitefield, and Charles Chauncy (who opposed the awakening).

I thought I knew how to run this search but I haven't been successful. Do I run it under Basic Search selecting the created collection, search within the Library via the created collection or is there a way to search within just the created collection itself by working through Collections? In any event when I attempt to limit the search by pubdate I get lost.

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700732#Comment_700732

Is there a way to first do a collection of just all the resources called "Library of Early American History". I am asking because the first problem I have is knowing what is in the collection without looking at the pdf of all the resources. This set is massive, has been thrown into our libraries. How do I even know where to begin?

Because of the size of this resource I don't know an easy way of doing that other than by publisher. The problem with that collection rule is there is another resource in Pre-Pub that would add another 25K documents to the collection.

What I did was to add a tag to all these resources. I sorted my Library by Last Updated, clicked on the first one, scrolled down and shift clicked on the last one, then opened the info box and chose Add These Tags to All. I used AmHistC as my tag. I then used maytag:AmHistC to create my collection.

You could create the collection by entering "American Antiquarian" as the collection rule and avoid the potential conflict as well.

I am not going to buy the English History collection so I wouldn't have a problem creating a collection by the publisher as others might, but this custom tagging for some resources produced as a collection is a habit of mine.

If you have other collections, you may find some of these new resources have found a home there, depending on your collection rules, For example I have a Sermons collection in which the sermons from this collection appeared. My rule is title:sermon OR subject:sermon -outline . It catches a few it shouldn't and misses a few it should have. (Someone else may have a better rule.)

I have created an American History Documents collection using this rule: subject:history AND subject:(America, "United States") AND mytag:AmHistC. I hope to use this along with the Publication Date information to look for historical background documents within a specific time frame.

I'm sure as time goes on we will have more examples of how to organize and make use of this vast resource.

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700739#Comment_700739

I thought I knew how to run this search

I typed that string directly in the Library find box restricting the Library to just the American History Collection I referred to.

Gerard Shanley

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700779#Comment_700779

Got it! Thanks again.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700783#Comment_700783

What I did was pull all the psalters into a pre-existing collection of Psalters, used "title:sermon subject:sermon" to make a collection of the sermons, used subject:(liturgy, worship[) to select those entries for a pre-existing collection then I am manually dividing the remainder into two collections - "put aside" for one of little obvious interest and "early American documents" for those of interest.

Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700778#Comment_700778

I have created an American History Documents collection using this rule: subject:history AND subject:(America, "United States") AND mytag:AmHistC

When I did this (after tagging), I received 520 resources in the collection. Should there not be more? I tagged all resources I saw from 1550 to 1810.

I really do not understand why each new resource and series cannot be tagged as the resources are being produced. I have all these new resources, and cannot know what I have without referring to https://www.logos.com/libraryofearlyamericanhistorylist

Matthew C Jones

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700778#Comment_700778

I'm sure as time goes on we will have more examples of how to organize and make use of this vast resource.

Your post has given me some good training. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700899#Comment_700899

When I did this (after tagging), I received 520 resources in the collection. Should there not be more?

That's how many I have in the 'sub collection' of this bigger collection.

Should there be more? Not with this rule, as we have both shown. Now the larger question is 'Have we captured all the documents we would want to have in this sort of collection?" There is more work to be done to decide the answer. I haven't dug into the subject tagging yet to see what else would be good to add either through a better collection rule or manually adding them.

There are so many different sorts of documents, I think it is going to take a while to organize them.

Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700937#Comment_700937

Should there be more? Not with this rule

Thanks Mark. Your response is a big help.

What I wish is that I could take the complete list of documents from https://www.logos.com/libraryofearlyamericanhistorylist and click on any of the resources to pull up the resource...Or to have this complete list in a collection so I could then study the list and start putting things in categories, collections of my own choosing. I am not understanding why Logos could not do this at least....each time they sell a bundle, a series, etc, they have a simple tag identifying that bundle, series etc. Then we the user can make our own tags and make new collections. Right now I feel I have a Library of early American History, but I have no idea apart from this above link as to what it contains, so I have no idea how to find what I have.

Good would be if every resource from now on was tagged with the publisher, the bundle or series it comes in, the author...these to me are basic tagging that should be present with every resource.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700950#Comment_700950

You may make a collection with publisher:"Text Creation Partnership" either on the fly in the library panel or as a more permanent collection under the collection tools. Then sort on subject and on author and you'll be able to get a sense of what is in it.

I'll admit to not being a fan of tagging of bundles, packages or collections as I have little interest in how I got a resource once it is in my library. But from the forums I suspect I am in the minority. Publisher and author are in the metadata when we receive new resources.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700958#Comment_700958

You may make a collection with publisher:"Text Creation Partnership" either on the fly in the library panel or as a more permanent collection under the collection tools. Then sort on subject and on author and you'll be able to get a sense of what is in it.

This is what I was going to suggest too. Sorting by Author is a good way to browse and find works in this collection written by an author you're studying, e.g.:

And if you sort by Subject, you can easily browse for works about the author you're studying:

As these are all primary source documents from the period, if you're wanting to study about the culture of the time period, it might save you time to look at secondary resources first: history books that talk about the Great Awakening or the culture in in America during the time period when it occurred. That might help you home in on what sorts of resources you might want to read in this collection. Letters, pamphlets, laws, speeches, journals, hymnals, etc.

It's too bad they are all categorized as Type "Monograph" -- it would be good if there were a finer level of type for exactly this purpose. This is the sort of thing you'd have to take the time yourself to do using tagging. It would be laborious going through all 4977 resources and determining what type of literature they all are. Large numbers of them can be done swiftly by filtering the library (with that collection selected in the collections dropdown first) using keywords like "letter" and so on, then selecting large groups of resources that match that keyword and tagging them all at once appropriately. But it'll still be a big project.

Stephen Steele

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700964#Comment_700964

So it would be expecting too much to hope the sermons would appear in the sermon section of a passage guide?

Stephen Steele

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700986#Comment_700986

Also - no send to kindle. Is that coming?

Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/701011#Comment_701011

The publishers don't seem to be listed on https://www.logos.com/libraryofearlyamericanhistorylist

Only authors and publication date. How many publishers are in this library of early American History?

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700950#Comment_700950

What I wish is that I could take the complete list of documents from https://www.logos.com/libraryofearlyamericanhistorylist and click on any of the resources to pull up the resource.

As has been pointed out you can create your own collection to do this so you can scan it in Library. A couple of strategies have already been suggested to create this collection.

The list on the web site has a bit more information that is helpful, but that isn't available to us in the program itself.

Rosies' suggestions of using Subject and Author sorting on the Library will give you help grasping what you have. You could create author collections or see if creating a collection by subject is helpful to you.

Knowing something about the time period and at least some of the authors gives you a leg up in using the resource. After all, this is a collection of source documents in raw form. There is nothing to tie them together. No timeline, curator's comments, etc.

The collection is also quite eclectic. Some of the data is a bit 'rough'. There are resources with significant gaps because the source material must have been in poor condition. Never-the-less this is an amazing archive.

If instead of just monograph we had document types such as sermons, theologies, tracts, catalogs, catechisms, speeches, etc. we wold be helped. But I don't expect Logos to supply 4900 documents for $50 and create new document types and sort the documents according to those types. Community tags may be the way to accomplish this.

Some good ideas are already being shared how to get a handle on this collection. I am sure you'll contribute some findings, and others will, too. It will just take some time to see how to make use of this.

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700986#Comment_700986

So it would be expecting too much to hope the sermons would appear in the sermon section of a passage guide?

I think so for the price we paid. Adding the labels takes a lot of manual ($$) work.

For now we will need to be content to use the old way: put the sermons in a collection and add that collection to the sermon starter and passage guides.

Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/701036#Comment_701036

Thanks Mark for your patience. Yes, for the price, it is incredible.

Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/700958#Comment_700958

I'll admit to not being a fan of tagging of bundles, packages or collections

Thanks for your contribution, MJ Smith. I understand your reasoning here. But in a collection like this, such tagging of bundles, packages, collections can help in the current issue of each individual user being able to sort through the new resources to be able to know what he/she has and how he/she wishes to organize them.

Stephen Steele

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/701036#Comment_701036

So it would be expecting too much to hope the sermons would appear in the sermon section of a passage guide?

I think so for the price we paid. Adding the labels takes a lot of manual ($$) work.

Makes sense - though anyone buying it from today onwards will be paying $250!

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/701146#Comment_701146

though anyone buying it from today onwards will be paying $250!

Wow. Hadn't seen that. Quite a jump. But still about 5 cents per document. Can't do too much hand tagging for that either.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/701034#Comment_701034

Rosies' suggestions of using Subject and Author sorting on the Library will give you help grasping what you have.

I can't take credit for it. MJ posted the suggestion first. I merely illustrated it with screenshots.

James Hiddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/701013#Comment_701013

Sounds like a nice collection thanks [Y]