I spent a considerable amount of money for Houlden, Leslie, and Antone Minard. Jesus in History, Legend, Scripture, and Tradition: A World Encyclopedia [2 Volumes]. New York, NY: ABC-CLIO, 2015. (Jesus in History, Legend, Scripture, and Tradition: A World Encyclopedia [2 volumes] | Logos Bible Software) which, despite its broad range, has surprisingly few headwords. Because it is an ebook, the table of contents fails to identify the subheading under a headword; rather, they show at the same level. Fortunately, Logos provides a solution -- Factbook tags -- or, rather, I should say used to offer a solution when they accessed a now defunct Google dataset for tags not in Logos. But now Logos has ~25 entries for "Christianity in ___" but none for Ethiopia so I link to two Ethiopian churches instead. There are other similar minor anomalies - like no entry for unqualified "Eucharist" as least in the pick list. But I am used to such anomalies because the sources used to build Factbook, like the resources sold by Logos, are skewed towards evangelical and reformed, Logos' largest market judging from the offerings and the forums. But then I hit it - no entry for Gideons International. No entry, evangelical organization so I can't blame the normal bias, no way to add an entry as we were able to do in the distant past, no way to mark the headword skipped so it is findable to add a tag if ever available, no way to notify Logos of the missing entry, but just to add "insult to injury" there is a Factbook time record "The Gideons Is Founded"
All the annoyances with the Logos Controlled Vocabulary come flooding back:
- I can't tag the Talmud by rabbi because factbook does not carry the names of the Tannaim and Amoraim
- I can't tag most the A-to-Z dictionaries (Judaism, Coptic Church, Druze, Orthodox Church, Islam) because other Abrahamic religions aren't in the LCV; non-Western churches are marginalized ...
- The tags are inconsistent in how they name people - presence or absence of St. or religious order are examples which makes even simple name searches sometimes frustrating
- The Factbook "pages" with the least information are precisely the ones I want to look up because the information is not commonly known but visible progress on linking has been missing for some time.
Please, if you are going to sell me unformatted, expensive Bible reference books, please provide me with tools to make them useful in ways you have not. I am sure many of your users, like me, want to explore the context. For me, it is often the key to finding an interesting bit of trivia that few, if any, have heard before - my method of keeping the participants listening.
