You can reduce your effort in searching by using collections to limit your library to resources most relevant to your search.  It gives you fewer search results that searching your complete library would.  You also find useful information more readily when you use collection to search where the information is.

Actions are highlighted in yellow and search terms are bold and underlined. Things and menus are bold.

Setting up a collection is just a matter of clicking the New button and writing the search terms to search your library and putting the search terms in the collection panel’s “Start with resource matching” box.  It is recommended and assumed that you read or have read “How to search well” before this.  Before you can write a good search of your library, you must understand how your library is set up.  The Logos help is woefully lacking when it comes to covering the library and collections but the logos wiki can help. You can access the collections panel through the “Tools” menu.

Right clicking the column heading in either the library or collections allows you to change which columns are displayed.  Also the menu that is displayed shows most of the fields one can search.  Check the wiki page to see how to search it.  Go online to wiki.cogos.com to wiki page on the library and search the page for “column Heading” to find the list of fields in the library.  These include the column headings you see when you open your library.  You can move a column anytime by dragging it to where you want it.  There are a few search fields that are not Headings.  The wiki page also shows you how to search each of these fields.  You do well to familiarize yourself with the wiki page. 

Open up you library (it is the book icon between the  house and the command box in the top left corner of Logos.  Look at the left column titled “Type” and look at the rows in that column as you scroll down.  These are the things that will yield results when you search for them in the type field.  Don’t expect results searching for them in the Author field.  You probably saw a few rows that said Bible, so lets try a quick search. Enter   type:Bible   in the search box and search.  Now all of the rows say Bible.  Look on the left just under the search box to see how many results you got.  This is the number of Bibles you have in your library.  Now search for    type:Bible  Commentary .  All the rows still say Bible in the type column but how many results do you have now, if any.  This search is the same as searching for (Type:Bible AND Commentary).  Search for type:”Bible Commentary”.  Now click the Type heading and see what happens.  Click again and see what happens.  What changed?  Click again and see what happens.  This is how you can quickly see what terms you can search for in the Type column and get results.  Looking at the list can help you decide what search would help you find the resources most likely to provide you the information you need.  Do you need subject content like encyclopedias or media like images or maps?  These are the things you think about when searching they type.  Notice there is no space after the colon.

Some useful collections formed by searching type: might be:

Encyclopedias     ­‑‑      Type:Encyclopedias
Dictionaries         --      Type:(Dictionary, Thesaurus)      Items separated by commas are OR-ed.
Lexicons              --      Type:Lexicon
Bible Commentaries -- Type:”Bible Commentaries”  Quotations required for spaces.
Glossaries         --       Type:glossary
Courseware        --       Type:Courseware
Bible notes         --        Type:"Bible Notes"

If you try type:commentaries it will get the Bible commentaries.  But if you also have commentaries on Plato, Church fathers, or Shakespeare etc. it will get them also. (Yes, you can get Shakespeare commentaries in Logos) You may not have any of these now, but you may have them latter.  They may come in a packaged deal.  You want to write your searches so they will do what you want them to do even as your library grows and changes in the future. 

Why are the parenthesis included with “Type:(Dictionary, Thesaurus)”?  This is because in my library and perhaps in yours also Type:Dictionary, Thesaurus included types that it should not have.  This is easy to notice if you keep the library grouped by type.  Adding parenthesis solves this problem.  Later we will see that in advance searches of the library we will need to encapsulate the entire element in parenthesis like (Type:(Dictionary, Thesaurus))  to get the statement to work correctly.

Subject field

The next most useful field is the Subject field.  Click on the subjects heading to see the subjects in your library.  Pay attention to the subjects starting with Bible.  Notice the periods and spaces.  They must be match exactly and anything with a space requires quotations.  Notice the books of the Bible listed.  This is how you get a collection on a specific book of the Bible.  How can we form a search for Commentaries on the Pentateuch?

Subject:"Bible. O.T. Genesis--Commentaries”, "Bible. O.T. Exodus--Commentaries”, "Bible. O.T. Leviticus--Commentaries”, "Bible. O.T. Numbers--Commentaries”, "Bible. O.T. Deuteronomy--Commentaries”, "Bible. O.T. Pentateuch--Commentaries”

Compare that search to the one below.  They both will do the same thing even though the second one is much shorter.  It looks cleaner and is easier to understand.

Subject:”Bible. O.T. (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Pentateuch)—Commentaries”

Imagine trying to do this for the entire Old Testament.  Subject:"Bible. O.T. * --commentaries"  The asterisk “*” is a wild card meaning equal to anything of 0 to many characters.  The asterisk equals Genesis, Exodus … Malachi.  This statement will match anything that begins with Bible. O.T. and ends with –commentaries.

For all bible commentaries OT and NT

Subject:"Bible. (O.T.,N.T.) * --commentaries"  seems good, but in this case Type:”Bible Commentary”  is better because the subject search hit results(1%) that were not truly commentaries.

This next one is my Apologetis (short list) collelction

(subject:Apologetics,Evangilism  ) AND pubdate:>1990 ANDNOT (type:media OR "Van Til")

It gets results for the subjects of both apologetics and evangelism because I feel apologetics is useful in evangelism.  Many people believe, and I agree, apologetics is also useful in strengthening the church.  I have limited the search to only those results that are newer than 1990.  I have also eliminated Type: media and the collection by the author “Van Til” which is in my long list collection.

We will do less hands-on searching and spend more time trying to understand the searches in this tutorial.

Another of my subject collections shows that sometimes a person may want to search all search fields at once.  This is done by not specifying any.  My collection for “Ancient Egypt” simply searches for “Egypt” however it gets 5 times the number of hits Subject:Egypt Subject:Egypt and Subject:Egypt--Antiquities,"Egypt in the Bible" is even more precise; However, my “ancient writings AD” collection has “early church fathers” does very well and finding these resources.  Maybe “church fathers” does better.  My atheism collection is simply “atheism”

Here is one for church legal issues.

subject:("ecclesiastical law", "Church and state", "Church management--law and legislation", "clergy--legal status")

For “Culture NT”

((subject:("Bible.N.T.--Manners and Customs","Metaphor in the Bible"))

A more complete statement might be:

((subject:("Bible.N.T.--Manners and Customs","Metaphor in the Bible")) OR title:customs,Cultural,manners) ANDNOT (title:Egypt,assyria OR subject:"Bible.O.T.") ANDNOT (type:commentary OR title:"Talmud and Hebraica" OR author:"DAVID ROKEAH")

For “Culture” in general

((subject:("Bible.O.T,N.T).--Manners and Customs","Metaphor in the Bible")) OR (title:(customs,Cultural,manners) ANDNOT type:"Bible Commentary"))

Bible Studies lesson guides

((Title:("Summarized Bible","talk thru the bible")) OR (subject:"Bible--Commentaries.") OR "study bible") ANDNOT ((series:("Word Biblical","The Exposit")) OR  Calvin)

Language

Now let us look at the Language field. “Lang:”.  sometimes you want to limit your search to resources of a certain language.  Maybe one that your can read or one that would have the original word you are searching for.  I often do a Milestone search of verses in all my English Bibles the Collection Looks like this: Type:Bible AND Lang:English .  If I wanted to search for λογος in Greek language resources Lang:Greek keeps me from searching All Resources.  If I wanted to look up a document in the Church Fathers in English I could use “church Fathers” AND Lang:English to help find the resource.  Maybe Lang:Hebrew,Aramaic could be useful sometime.

I have already used the “Publication Date” Pubdate:  It need a little explanation.  Pubdate:2006 shows only resources published in the year 2006.  If you us the “greater than sign” “>”  Pubdate:>2006 shows only resources published after and not including the year 2006.  The “less than sign” works in a similar fashion.  If we want to include the date we can use “greater than or Equal”  “>=” the equals sign comes after the greater than sign.  The same is true of the less than.  It is “<=”

pubdate:<=2019
pubdate:>=2019
pubdate:=2019
pubdate:"n.d."   n.d.=”no date”    There are some resources that have empty pubdate fields.
Pubdate:>=1600 AND pubdate:<=1850  A range of dates.

One final note on the publication date.  A person limits the search using Pubdate to keep the information relevant to a specific range of dates.  Sometimes Logos will “Re-Publish” a resource.  When they do this, the resource gets a new publication date.  This is the practice of the publishing industry.  The book and its information may be from the 1800 but it may have a publication date of 2019 even though the title page says 1818.  When I seen this, I contacted Logos with a rather forceful email to say  we were not getting the quality we needed.  They got back to me rather nicely and explained the practice but without a work around. If you ever have a problem with Logos, let the know (nicely).  I would expect they will look into it and get back with you.  The online forum works great.  One way to work around this problem is to ANDNOT publisher:”Lexham Press”  or a person could build a collection of the offending resources to ANDNOT.   ANDNOT {Collection “dates off”} .  A person could also us tags to identify them and remove them from a collection ANDNOT mytag:”dates off” which is probably the best solution since it is easier than maintain a collection for it.

Electronic Publication Date

Other date related fields are the Electronic publishing field epubdate: .

Last updated field 

updateddate:<less Jan 1, 2019>  The date must be later than you install date to get results.
updateddate:<greater Jan 1, 2019>
updateddate:<equals Jan 1, 2019>
updateddate:<greater Jan 1, 2018> AND updateddate:<less Jan 1, 2019>
{UpdatedDate 14d}  updated in last 14 days.  You can use d,w,m,y for days, weeks, months, and years.  Note: the capital “U” and “D” in UpdatedDate must be there.

Date added

Date Added addeddate: and {AddedDate} work the same as for last updated. This is good for finding and checking out new resources to familiarize yourself with them so you can fully utilize your library.  You can also temporarily AND it with a collection’s statement to see if your new resources are included when they should be. 

Now is a good time to cover the rating field.  It works the same way as pubdate. 

The ratings are 1-5 and 0 means no rating.

Rating:5 matches on resources rated with five stars.
Rating:>3 matches resources rated above 3 stars, that is 4 and 5 stars.
Rating :>= matches matches resources rated 3 stars and above. That is 3,4. And 5 stars.
rating:>=0  matches all resources.  If you wanted to search all resources except a few you could use
rating:>0 ANDNOT (xyz, “bad resource”, Not Relevant") 

Just searching for the ANDNOT part of the statement does not work.  You must have something to ANDNOT it with to get any results.

If you have a list of favorite authors a collection of them could be made with Author:”Daniel Gray”, “Best author ever”,”good author” or maybe something more like, author:"F,F, Bruce",Wilkins, Briggs,”Dale Allison”,”James Montgomery Boice”

Sometimes there may be a particular publisher you really like or really dislike.  Then Publisher: would come in handy.

Publisher:(Zondervan,"Lockman Foundation","Thomas Nelson","Bethany House",Faithlife, Moody,Eerdmans,"Christian Publishing House") ANDNOT Publisher:zyx

Series

Click on the Series heading to get a list of all the series in your library.  You can use Series: to add them to a collection.  series:(yale,icc,"Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible",lifeguide,illustrator)

Grouping your library by Device (click on the Device heading) will show you what resources are on each of your devices.  Devices does not include your desktop (or perhaps the first system you install to).  device: You would only use this in a collection if you wanted to limit yourself to the resources available on a device for some reason.  Device:"lge VS996" .  The Filter side pannel on the left side (a button in the top left corner will open the side panel) has options to filter the library by any of your devices that have downloaded a library item.

My Tags

The mytag: field is a customizable field.  In the library panel, select any resource row (don’t click on the title unless you want to open it.) and open the information panel using the “i” icon in the top right corner area of the library panel.  There is a box just under the resource description in the information panel, that says “Add tag” this is where you can add a custom tag to the resource.  You can also add tags to multiple resources at once.  Just select them and enter the tag.  If they are all in a row you can select the top one and Shift+arrow down to select the rest.  You can also do a search to get the resources you want the tag attached to and then add the tag to the all at once.  You can add multiple tags to a resource but one at a time. Just enter one tag and then enter the next.

Title

The title is another editable field which is really nice.  You may 4 books named John but only one of them is a book you like to use allot.  When It shows up in search results you can never be sure it is the correct book without checking the author. Again in the information panel, at the very top is the title.  Click the pencil next to it to edit it.  The name change may not become effective until the screen changes and is refreshed. Searching for a title can be used several ways.  It can be used to augment a subject search.  If a word is in the title, it is probably on that subject.  AND-ing subject: AND title: may get more results.  Subject:Egypt AND Title:Egypt.  Another  way to use title: is to identify a specific resource to add or remove to/from a collection.  I have a few collections prefixed with “@” so it is at the top of the list and easy to get to.  One of these is @Current interest

Title:”The School of Biblical Evangelism”, “The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching”,”Discovering Biblical Equality” OR author:groothuis OR (type:Grammar AND title:Morphology)

Here is one for small groups: title:group?    Notice another wild card “?”

Here is one for maps

(atlas ANDNOT quarterly) OR title:Geographic,atlas OR (title:map ANDNOT type:commentary)

In this case it was not necessary to use the parenthesis.  The ANDNOT are processed before the OR.  When ever you have multiple items next to a ANDNOT you want the result ANDNOT-ed to, you need parenthesis.

Abbreviated Title

The abbreviated title is also editable in the information panel.  It is found just below the title.  Not all resources have Abbreviated titles but that is not a problem because you can give it one.  Titles can be long and make the search very long.  Abbrev: can shorten it up quite a bit.  For instance the title

“John, Acts: Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary, Volume 2”

Is very long compared to the abbreviated title of “ZIBBC NT2”. 

So for this one we can use abbrev:“ZIBBC NT2”  or abbrev:“ZIBBC would get the entire series since the series name is almost as long as the title. 

abbrev:ZIBBC,icc ANDNOT abbrev:Deuteronomy(icc)

Renaming a collection  is as simple as changing the text in the collection’s name box.

The collections panel also has two boxes  the “+ these resources” and the “-Minus these resources.”  You can drag any resource from the list below up to the desired box to add or remove it to/from the collection.  This is great for small collections or as a way to make small changes when tweaking a collection.

To delete a collection, open collections and right-click open on a collection name and select “Delete.”