How to Reorder Books in a Collection

Today’s post is from Morris Proctor, certified and authorized trainer for Logos Bible Software. Morris, who has trained thousands of Logos users at his two-day Camp Logos seminars, provides many training materials.

In a recent blog post about displaying a verse from all Bibles, I suggested creating a collection of English Bibles. This suggestion in turn generated some discussion about the order of books in a collection. If you’ve created a collection from the Tools menu, you’ve noticed that Logos alphabetizes the resources in a collection.

To illustrate, in a theology-books collection, Baker’s Dictionary of Practical Theology appears before Concise Theology because B is of course before C (A).

When using this collection, therefore, in a search, the Baker results appear before the Concise hits (B).

The question then is, how can we move the Concise ahead of the Baker yet leave them both in the collection? The answer is: rename Concise. This method is a little tedious, but it does accomplish the goal.

• Click the Library icon

• Click the Resource information icon on the library’s toolbar (C)

• Type title:theology in the library’s Find box to display resources with theology in the title (D)

• Click something other than the title of Concise Theology in the viewing area (E) to display the book in the Resource information pane (F)

• Click the Edit (pencil) icon next to the title in the Resource information pane (G)

• Type the numeral 1 in front of the title in the Edit box so the name of the book is now 1 Concise Theology (H)

• Press the Enter key to save the name

• Repeat this process with other theology books using the numerals 2, 3, 4 etc. (I)

• Close the Library

• Choose Tools | Collections

• Name the collection Theology Books (J)

• In the Rule box, type title:theology to list resources with theology in the title (K)
  (Please note: this is not a complete rule to locate all theology books, but used just for illustration purposes.)

• Notice that the resources with numbers in their names are now at the top of the list (L)

To see this newly ordered collection in action, generate a basic search in Theology Books and notice which books appear at the top of the list! (M)

Of course, you can use this same method to reorder books in any collection, such as History Books, Ethics Books, or others. This method ensures that your favorite books always appear at the top of your search results.