Enhancing the "Clippings" Experience

For me, both in sermon preparation and academic research, the ability to produce clippings easily is one of the stand-out features of Logos. It's certainly the feature I use most. The ability to tag those clippings is really helpful, as are the built-in scripture reference tags many resources produce.

For me the clippings experience would be greatly enhanced by the addition of a couple of additional features:

I would love to be able to filter clippings within a clippings file easily and reliably by my user-defined tags.
I would like to be able to sort the clippings within a clippings file by my user-defined tags and by the in-built scripture reference tags.

Ideally, the way to access this would be within the drop-down menu.

Please …

Every blessing

Alan

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Keith Larson

For me, both in sermon preparation and academic research, the ability to produce clippings easily is one of the stand-out features of Logos. It's certainly the feature I use most. The ability to tag those clippings is really helpful, as are the built-in scripture reference tags many resources produce.

Alan,

I think for most Logos users "Clippings" remains somewhat of a mystery. I have debated whether to use notes or clippings many times. Would you mind briefly describing how you use clippings and why you think it is better than notes for those applications?

Thanks for your consideration.

Keith

Alan Macgregor

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614327#Comment_614327

Keith

I find that Clippings are a really good way of gathering material to be read, chewed and digested in both sermon preparation and academic research.

Sermon Preparation

I use a Clipping to gather quotations/citations from commentaries, Bibles, other Logos resources. For example, I create a new Clipping file for this week's sermon, entitled Psalm 013 - Engaging with God. At a certain point in my study I refer to several commentaries, as I work through the passage.
Let's say I find a particularly pithy comment or sharp insight in a commentary. I then select the relevant text and right click. Among the choices that I have in the lower right corner of the pop-up menu is the option to add to my Clippings document.

Carry on doing that until you have completed your survey/trawl of the commentaries.
Review the Clippings document and tag. as appropriately.

You notice that the clipping above has the title and the time the clipping was added.

To access the bibliographic information just click the information button in the bottom right corner.
You can even add your own notes to an individual clipping by clicking on Notes!

In short, clippings are a quick way of gathering and organising your study results. I find it an invaluable step in preparation and research.

Now, if Logos would just add the features I want … [:D]

Every blessing

Alan

Keith Larson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614341#Comment_614341

Thanks for the reply.

I have been dragging selections to a note file which creates hyperlinks to the source. I guess the advantage of using clippings is the ability to tag each quote independently with topical tags, thus making it more assessable to other projects when topical searches are done.

What do you do to mark whole articles or chapters for later use. It see three ways of doing.

1) dragging a chapter/article heading to a note file.

2) adding the same to a clipping file. (adding topic and scripture reference tags)

3) Creating a "Favorites" follower on either the topic or text, then adding the heading to that favorites subfolder.

I am starting to think the clipping is the best option.

What would be cool is an "Add Cross-references" to the clipping menu. Using you text as an example, not only would Ps.13:6 be tagged, but every text in the bible that is related to that verse! In addition, by searching a Topical Cross Reference such as Naves, it would be possible to automate the addition of tags!

Keith Larson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614352#Comment_614352

Another question, any performance issue with large Clipping files as is common with note files?

Bruce Dunning

For me the clippings experience would be greatly enhanced by the addition of a couple of additional features:

I would love to be able to filter clippings within a clippings file easily and reliably by my user-defined tags.

I would like to be able to sort the clippings within a clippings file by my user-defined tags and by the in-built scripture reference tags.

Ideally, the way to access this would be within the drop-down menu.

Great suggestions Alan.

Alan Macgregor

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614352#Comment_614352

What do you do to mark whole articles or chapters for later use.

I've never actually done that with clippings but I see where that might be useful. I think I would select the chapter title or article title and add it to clippings and add a note to "research later". I've even added an extra clipping to a document from a print resource, by dictating the reference inside Apple Pages and then cutting and pasting it to a

What would be cool is an "Add Cross-references" to the clipping menu.

I tend to follow up embedded cross-refs at the time and add them and any relevant text to the clippings document. That way I can see the relevance of the cross-reference in the context of the document at a later date. Here's one I made only a few minutes ago inserting a quote from a C.S. Lewis book into the clipping document. Just right click in the resource you are using at the verse where you want the clipping to be. That creates a blank clipping with the verse tag you want. Then just paste your note/quotation/citation and add any tags you want.

Above I have added the Lewis quote to the Clippings document with the auto-tag Ps 13:1 (which is the quote's context) and added the "Complaint" tag myself.

Hope that helps.

Every blessing

Alan

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614466#Comment_614466

[Y][Y][Y][Y][Y]

I too have been frustrated at the "almost" nature of the tag feature.

Mike Tourangeau

I would love to be able to filter clippings within a clippings file easily and reliably by my user-defined tags.

Right now you can cmd +f (on a mac) to search the clipping file, but I agree that it would be nice to see greater functionality in clippings.

Alan Macgregor

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614630#Comment_614630

Right now you can cmd +f (on a mac) to search the clipping file

Thanks for your response. It has afforded me an opportunity to clarify my reasons for wanting what I asked for.

Indeed, you can search as you suggest, Mike, and that is what I do at present – it's all I can do. Unfortunately the search works within the text of the clippings as well as the tags. This can produce extraneous/spurious results which are irrelevant at that point.

Sorting to organise all your material in a tagged order and then filtering to focus in upon a tag heading would provide more accurate, more flexible study results.

Every blessing

Alan

Donnie Hale

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614648#Comment_614648

This thread has been helpful in both when and how to use clippings. I used one over the last few weeks to collect resources for a paper I was writing. After reading this thread, it helped me realize that clippings was the right (or at least the best available) tool for the job.

I have a question and a suggestion.

Question: When you click on an entry in a clipping to go the clipped location, you get a short sort of flash/highlight which helps identify the location in the resource to which the clipping points. However, that's not really enough. I'd like to see the exact section I highlighted when I added the entry to the clippings file. Is there a way to do that? An actual highlight, or a visual filter, or some other means to enable that? If not, that seems like a fairly substantial oversight.

Suggestion: I think that elsewhere in this thread, it's been suggested that we be able to search in the clippings file. I reiterate that suggestion. I'd like to add the idea to be able to create a dynamic collection directly from a clipping file. Perhaps via the panel menu. Perhaps by being able to drag a handle in the open clippings file into the "Plus these resources" section of an open collection. All resources currently in the clipping file would be added to the collection. As entries are added to the clipping, the collection should be updated to include the referenced resources. If we had this capability, we'd have the ability to search in the resources within a clipping file.

If I had these 2 capabilities - ability to easily see the originally selected section in a clipped resource, and the ability to search the resources in a clipping file by means of a collection - I think I could use the clippings feature in an end-to-end fashion during the research and writing phases of a project.

My $.02 ...

Donnie

Matt Hamrick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614327#Comment_614327

In the academic world clippings has been very valuable. Gone are the days of research in the library to save your information on an index card. Clippings not only allows me to save the information but the bibliographical info is also there, plus you can make a bibliography straight from the clippings menu.

Alan Macgregor

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615345#Comment_615345

In the academic world clippings has been very valuable. Gone are the days of research in the library to save your information on an index card. Clippings not only allows me to save the information but the bibliographical info is also there, plus you can make a bibliography straight from the clippings menu.

[Y] [Y] [Y] [Y] [Y]

Pastor Kay

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/614327#Comment_614327

I also use clippings for sermon preparation. I create a new clipping for each Lectionary date as I come to it- for example, this morning I created one for Proper 14A. Then I put all the relevant commentary reading into the clipping. Makes for much less searching around- just one document to go to! And I haven't used the notes feature much, to be honest with you, but it seems clippings are meant to be large files- mine are often 16-24 pages, and there's no loading trouble.

I wish we could read our clippings on our mobile devices. It would be great to be able to look at my sermon-prep clipping on my phone while out and about, waiting for my husband to finish shopping or something. Creating a PDF and transferring the file is clunky and irritating.

I also wish we could highlight within a clipping, that would be great. That way I could highlight what I find useful this year, and then perhaps in three years when the lectionary comes around again I'd be able to turn off those highlights, and use a different highlight to be able to note what jumps out at me then, and compare the two.

David Kim

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615471#Comment_615471

I completely agree. I just started my Th.M. program after 15 years of being out of school. I'm writing my first paper today and was using the clipping function like "index carding" that I used to do. As I was clipping via logos and adding tags ... I realize there's no way to filter the clippings by tags. This would be a great feature! [H]