TIP of the day: Don't wait for Logos ... DIY sermon labeling

MJ. Smith
MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,406
edited November 20 in English Forum

If I were prioritizing the tagging of sermons, the Early Church and Medieval Fathers would have been the first sermons tagged. However, since Logos gave priority to more modern preachers, I've simply been slowly implementing my priorities by creating labels for sermons as I use them.

1. Recall that in https://community.logos.com/forums/p/117124/768798.aspx Mark Barnes provided the essential information:

{Label Sermon} — Populates the "Sermons" section of Passage Guides

  • Creator
  • Title
  • Subtitle
  • Series
  • References
  • Date
  • Liturgical Date

2. Create an appropriate highlighting palette:

a. Open the highlighting tool: Tools --> Library --> Highlighting

b. Click on New Palette

c. Provide an appropriate title and add a style

d. Give the style the name of your choice. Indicate that the style implies a label. Give the label and the attributes the names provided by Mark. Save your style.

3. Open an interesting collection of sermons such as Basil of Caesarea. On Social Justice. Translated by C. Paul Schroeder. Popular Patristics Series, Number 38. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009. Run a Passage Guide to discover that Amos 3:8 does not select the sermon "In Time of Famine and Drought".

4. Select the entire sermon then add your new label. (See Mark Barnes comments below).

5. Refresh your Passage Guide and the sermon will now be listed.

Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

Comments

  • Mark Barnes
    Mark Barnes Member Posts: 15,432 ✭✭✭

    Thanks for this, MJ.

    Can I add a couple of tips of my own?

    1. If you want to discover which resources already have sermon labelling (to make it easier to find those that don't), you can run a search in your whole library for {Label Sermon}. Or perhaps if you're checking a bunch of resources you could open them all, then run the search in all open resources. If you sort the results by resource, you could then quickly close the resources with results, and you know the others would benefit from manual labelling.
    2. Personally, I highlight the entire sermon before adding the highlighting/labelling. Generally, Logos does this, too. It won't make any difference with regard to the Passage Guide, but it does mean that if you want to you'd be able to search inside individual sermons, too. For example, you could search for (love NEAR grace) WITHIN {Label Sermon}, or forgiveness WITHIN {Label Sermon WHERE Creator ~ "Keller"}

    This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!

  • MJ. Smith
    MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,406

    Thanks Mark - additions to the tips are always appreciated ... and feel free to write them when you see a topic that needs covered.

    Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

  • James Taylor
    James Taylor Member Posts: 1,408 ✭✭✭

    Logos 10  | Dell Inspiron 7373 | Windows 11 Pro 64, i7, 16GB, SSD | iPhone 13 Pro Max

  • Don Awalt
    Don Awalt Member Posts: 3,521 ✭✭✭

    This is a really great tip but I can't get it to work - I did a refresh of the Passage Guide, and saw the sections spinning saying it was being regenerated, but I don't have any results still. What did I do wrong?

  • Don Awalt
    Don Awalt Member Posts: 3,521 ✭✭✭

    Fixed it! In the Step "This style implies a label" I had typed Sermon label instead of just Sermon - so the label was wrong! Note I had to delete the Note entry and re-add it, as it had the wrong label. Refresh and the sermon showed up! Nice tip MJ!

  • Bradley Grainger (Logos)
    Bradley Grainger (Logos) Administrator, Logos Employee Posts: 11,969

    MJ. Smith said:

    Strictly speaking, this is incorrect. "Date" and "Liturgical Date" need to be entered as data type references in the "Date" and (one of the) Liturgical Date data types respectively. However, the Label Entry helper doesn't allow you to specify those data types currently. (I believe there is a case in our system to enhance it for this.)

    Because those label attributes don't have the right data type, the PG section will never display them. (I'm not sure if there could be other negative side-effects in the application.)

  • MJ. Smith
    MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,406

    Thanks Bradley - I'd been puzzled that I couldn't set them to type: date/liturgical date

    Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

  • Jacob Hantla
    Jacob Hantla MVP Posts: 3,871

    This is good. Thanks

    Jacob Hantla
    Pastor/Elder, Grace Bible Church
    gbcaz.org

  • Timothy Jang
    Timothy Jang Member Posts: 73
    Hi, MJ.
    Thank you for the great tip. It might be very useful.

    By the way, I need your help if you could. I clicked {Label Sermon} from your post to open my Logos Software with the search result of all the sermons from my library, highlighted yellow.

    Would you let me know how I can dehighlight them?
  • Liam
    Liam Member Posts: 1,439 ✭✭✭

    MJ this is excellent! I had no idea that we could go ahead and manually tag our existing resources (not just pbs) and have them pop up in the sermons section of the guide. How cool! 

    Now I'm wondering though, could we all work together on a big huge group sermon tagging project and crowd source all our findings so that we get the benefits of others work as well as our own?

    Or does Logos plan on looking into these tags and eventually making them official anyway?

  • MJ. Smith
    MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,406

    I believe we can share the labels by using a shared palette defining the label and sharing the Note file containing the Labels. I don't know Logos' intent but I suspect that they need to review the accuracy of the labels before they'd make a decision to use the user created data.

    Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

  • Liam
    Liam Member Posts: 1,439 ✭✭✭

    MJ. Smith said:

    I believe we can share the labels by using a shared palette defining the label and sharing the Note file containing the Labels. I don't know Logos' intent but I suspect that they need to review the accuracy of the labels before they'd make a decision to use the user created data.

    This is excellent! May I suggest that someone who has a considerable number of labels (any type) make a faithlife group and upload their note file to it. Also make it one that users can contribute to. It's great that journals can also be labeled. I would love it if Logos included the ability for untagged commentaries to be labeled by users as well. As far as I'm concerned, the more labelling the merrier! -I don't think we'll have to worry too terribly about people mislabeling things. It seems that if you understand the complicated process of labeling, then you probably will do it right.

  • James Taylor
    James Taylor Member Posts: 1,408 ✭✭✭

    Liam said:

    someone who has a considerable number of labels (any type) make a faithlife group and upload their note file to it.

    [Y]

    Logos 10  | Dell Inspiron 7373 | Windows 11 Pro 64, i7, 16GB, SSD | iPhone 13 Pro Max

  • Bradley Grainger (Logos)
    Bradley Grainger (Logos) Administrator, Logos Employee Posts: 11,969

    Liam said:

    I had no idea that we could go ahead and manually tag our existing resources (not just pbs) and have them pop up in the sermons section of the guide.

    In 6.12 Beta 1 you will no longer need to tag your PBs. If you use the sermon metadata table (https://wiki.logos.com/Sermon_and_Illustration_Support), the corresponding {Sermon} label will be generated automatically.

  • James Taylor
    James Taylor Member Posts: 1,408 ✭✭✭

    In 6.12 Beta 1 you will no longer need to tag your PBs. If you use the sermon metadata table (https://wiki.logos.com/Sermon_and_Illustration_Support), the corresponding {Sermon} label will be generated automatically.

    Nice

    Logos 10  | Dell Inspiron 7373 | Windows 11 Pro 64, i7, 16GB, SSD | iPhone 13 Pro Max

  • Frank Sauer
    Frank Sauer Member Posts: 1,758 ✭✭✭

    This all seems like a lot of work to replicate what we used to have... I never remember having to use all these work arounds and change the format of my Sermons to include a table when we had the trusty Sermon File Addin

    Logos 10 - OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Windows 11, Android 15 & Android 14

  • MJ. Smith
    MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,406

    This all seems like a lot of work to replicate what we used to have... I never remember having to use all these work arounds and change the format of my Sermons to include a table when we had the trusty Sermon File Addin

    IIRC in Libronix the table was a fill in the blanks table.

    Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

  • Frank Sauer
    Frank Sauer Member Posts: 1,758 ✭✭✭

    MJ. Smith said:

    This all seems like a lot of work to replicate what we used to have... I never remember having to use all these work arounds and change the format of my Sermons to include a table when we had the trusty Sermon File Addin

    IIRC in Libronix the table was a fill in the blanks table.

    Exactly right MJ, so it was all taken care of neatly in the program. No need to modify your Sermons at the document level and the tagging was quite effective right from the fill in the blank table

    Logos 10 - OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Windows 11, Android 15 & Android 14

  • Liam
    Liam Member Posts: 1,439 ✭✭✭
    I'm finding that the sermons with longer titles are difficult to label. It's probably a bug, but when I type out the name of a puritan sermon, say: "THE WARNINGS OF SCRIPTURE ARE IN THE BEST MANNER ADAPTED TO THE AWAKENING AND CONVERSION OF SINNERS," after I click on the box with this text, the sermon title just disappears. Now if I do the same exact process, but simply name the sermon "Warnings", then it works fine.

    Is anyone else having this issue?
  • Liam
    Liam Member Posts: 1,439 ✭✭✭

    Liam said:

    Now I'm wondering though, could we all work together on a big huge group sermon tagging project and crowd source all our findings so that we get the benefits of others work as well as our own?

    Just created a Faithlife group for this. 

    Enjoy!

  • Liam
    Liam Member Posts: 1,439 ✭✭✭

    So, we can now populate our own sermon guide results by tagging our own resources. Does anyone know if we can populate our commentary guide sections by tagging our resources with scripture labels? This would be absolutely great if it was a possibility! MJ, any thoughts?

  • MJ. Smith
    MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,406

    I'll have to retest the Journals to make sure that user labeling is picked up there.

    Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

  • MJ. Smith
    MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,406

    Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."