L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #339 Two different ways to index people dictionaries and their consequences

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: All the people in the bible - Logos Forums

This post addresses dictionaries/encyclopedias where the entries are by a person's name; however, the same principles apply to all reference books. In the forums, the questions comes up as "I have my books in a linked set but the set sometimes fails." Remember that a linked set is linked by a common index. The problem arises when the common indexes don't have a common entry. Look at this example:

For the name "Mary", Factbook has a record for Biblical Referents which includes everyone in the Bible named Mary with subentries for each individual named Mary e.g. Mary Magdalene. This corresponds to how it is handled in Bromiley, G. W. “Mary.” Edited by Geoffrey W Bromiley. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Revised. Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979–1988. No matter which Mary's paragraphs I am reading, the reference is always to "Mary" as the headword. Logos doesn't know which Mary I am thinking of.

Factbook also has a record for Mary (Magdalene). This entry knows nothing about the other people sharing the name. This corresponds to how it is handled in Pope, Hugh. “St. Mary Magdalen.” Edited by Charles G. Herbermann, Edward A. Pace, Condé B. Pallen, Thomas J. Shahan, and John J. Wynne. The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church. New York: The Encyclopedia Press; The Universal Knowledge Foundation, 1907–1913.

If you navigate among resources that follow the second pattern, you have no problem. But if you are navigating to resources that have a mixture of the patterns, a resource of the first pattern can cause the application to lose track of which Mary is meant. This isn't a bug but rather the consequent of two indexes having different headwords to point to information about the same person. The most common place to see this problem is in Bible commentaries where verses are grouped together to be commented on and those groups vary by commentator.

Secret: I chose people and headwords to illustrate the problem because it is easy to understand; in life, headwords don't affect linked sets.

Ali Pope said:

We don't currently support headword panel linking.