- the column was created using myshelves as the lookup name (since it is a custom column, you will need to use #myshelves as the name when referring to the column). The human readable name can be Collections.
- edited the metadata for a few books and added the collection(s) you want them to show in in the collections box on the second page of the metadata editor.
- added the column names in the Collections tab (second tab for the Kobo Touch/Kobo Touch Extended driver configuration)
- connected your Kobo and made sure the metadata was updated
Also, after configuring the collections column, did you try reading the collections/shelves from the device using the Kobo Utilities plugin? This should be able to copy the on-device collections to your new Collections/#myshelves column.
One other item is that the column is only created in the active library. Easiest was to copy it to other libraries (if you have more that one) is to copy a book to the other library.
Series was popular before Kobo started showing series information. It will automagically put books into collections based on the series name.