Love all the new resources...but
...what I'd really like to see--and I don't think I can stress this point enough--is for Logos to
GO BACK AND UPDATE THE LINKS FOR RESOURCES THAT HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED FOR YEARS BUT WHICH CURRENTLY HAVE LOUSY LINKING.
The main advantage to digital resources is the hyperlink. Having resources that don't link to other resources I have in my digital library REALLY chaps my hiney. The infamous example is the Anchor Bible Dictionary, but there are tons of other resources with the same disease. I well understand that this is labor intensive, but it is also a "gotta have it" aspect of what all Logos resources stand for. For instance, when the Talmud PrePub ships, which I am eagerly anticipating, my question is...today...when it ships, will the dozens and dozens of resources I now have that reference it--the very references which have motivated me to advocate for the Talmud in Logos format--will those references to the Talmud "work"? Frankly, I fear the answer...but I hope my fears are unfounded.
I do know that tons of current potential links are "dead" or non-existent. For me, over and above Logos cranking out hundreds or thousands or millions of new titles each week/month/year, I want these forlorn links to be given life. I want to be given the best use of what I already have rather than have even more resources that ABD or other resources don't link to.
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"The Unbelievable Work...believe it or not." Little children...Biblical prophecy is not Christianity's friend.
This is a real problem, isn't it? From the users point of view we need those links to get the best use from our existing resources. From Logos' point of view they need the money from new resources.
Personally, I'd like to see the price of new resources reflect the work required to find links to the new resource in old resources, and added in. For many resources that wouldn't be a huge amount of work. A quick search in your library will bring up the references, and then it's a case of manually adding links.
That said, for important titles, I'd also like Logos to subsidise this through a central 'pot' created from (e.g.) a 1% levy on all sales. The Talmud is a good example of a resource which will cost many thousands of dollars to add links to, simply because there are so many. We probably couldn't afford the resource if we had to pay for it.
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Another issue that they've mentioned is that they are always working on adding links to old resources but they don't want to force us all to redownload our entire library to get the updated links every time a new resource (or three or four) ships. So they will keep revisiting old resources on some sort of a rotation and only pushing revised resources with links fixed through the pipeline every three months or so. The last time they did a resource update was a few months ago, so I'm guessing we're due for another one soon. But if I recall, they only updated 100 or so resource that time. That means it's gonig to be a long time to wait for our entire library to get its links fixed. I've got 4000+ books in mine. That'll be 40 cycles of updates, by which time I'm sure there will be a mass of new resources, requiring still more new links in old resources. And on and on it goes...
If anyone has any brilliant ideas for a solution to this, I'm sure Logos will be willing to listen.
Simple, Employ me, I would be happy to do it [:D]
I also agree that with any new resourse releace, older resources linking to it should also be updated for that enhanced experience...
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+2 [H]
+1 [Y]
I think they'd need to hire a whole army of eager people like you to stay on top of this. Imagine yourself sitting down with just one volume of Anchor Bible Dictionary (it's got 6 volumes on the order of 1000 pages each). Then consider that it is peppered with abbreviated references such as (ANET, 307) or JBL 83: 298–302. In some cases later references within one article assume the name of the work since it was mentioned earlier and only give the section/paragraph reference. We know about this from Scripture references (e.g., "particularly...in 3:13 and 1:4, 13; and the relationship between 3:2, 16") but it happens with other kinds of works, too. You'd have to carefully read through the entire volume, finding each reference, figuring out what it's actually referring to -- I'm sure there'd be a big table of abbreviations to help you (ANET is Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, which I have in Logos but ABD links don't work; JBL is Journal of Biblical Literature, still coming in pre-pub, but it would be great if all the links in my existing library just worked as soon as it ships), generating the appropriate tag for it, and editing that into the file, very carefully proof-checking your work. This would be very time-consuming and laborious (and probably boring/tedious) work. It would probably take you a couple of months to get through one volume. Now multiply that by six and that's just one of the 10,000+ resources in Logos's catalogue. Granted it's one of the ones that's more heavily loaded with links. But now you begin to see the magnitude of the job they've got ahead of them. And believe me, they do have people assigned to this very task who are working through the backlog. But as others point out, this work does not bring in any revenue for them. So I think it's hard for them to prioritize it. But if we can impress upon them how much extra value it gives us in our Logos libraries to have all the linking, and that we'd be more willing to shout from the rooftops about how awesome our Logos library is, and encourage them that it would bring in more revenue in the long run, maybe that would help their motivation to keep plugging away at this, and assign more people to the task.
We understand that, and (within reason), we're willing to wait. But it's much more difficult to understand why the Pillar Commentary on Ephesians contains around 50 references to Stott's BST commentary on the same book, but none of them are linked, despite the BST being available in Logos for three years. Indeed, just looking through the bibliography of that commentary, not a single resource appears to be linked, even though many of them (ICC, WBC, AB, Calvin, NICNT, Hendriksen, Schnackenburg, NIVAC, Westcott, Stott, NBC) are available in Logos.
That's not a mistake, that appears to be a deliberate policy (at least with this resource). More worryingly, several of those commentaries were available in Logos before this resource was created.
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what if there was a way for interested Logos users to do "packets" of work in large resources and entire resources worth of tagging and then submit them to Logos for proofing. Sort of like how you can allow your computer to help processing information for the SETI project. I guess there would need to be some training and some direction in a project such as this.
So far, Logos' attempts at this have not proved cost effective. When these packets are submitted they still have to be proof-read by someone in Logos, so that Logos can maintain it's standard of quality.
Help links: WIKI; Logos 6 FAQ. (Phil. 2:14, NIV)
I don't know what steps are needed or how Logos implements the resource linking for new works, but I would think it is a bit complex. First, we have to define what we mean by "new resources" and "old resources." By "old" and "new" do we mean the year when these resources were written? Or, the year Logos digitally published them? A resource that Logos makes available for purchase today may be one that was originally penned 100 years ago. Would I expect such a resource to link to my resources that were published in print 20 years ago? I don't see how that is possible. Perhaps I am not understanding the arguments here. Now, I do understand the need for newer resources to have proper links to older resources. I don't know how Logos does this, what is involved.
Also, what do we mean by links? Should we have a taxonomy of elements for links? Are we referring to other printed body of works, Internet databases, websites, wikis, etc? Bible verses, I think, are the most commonly linked elements. They are linked to whatever is your preferred translation. Other elements include references to scholarly commentaries, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and books. Anything else?
Paul Newsome's suggestion is interesting because I imagine that it takes considerable computing man-hours to search resources, find possible references to other resources, and record such findings. Logos can conduct a study on how a person would do this manually; then, develop a software program to help automate the tedious tasks. Humans can alpha test or beta test the results. One challenge would be the database structure to store all the findings - i.e. resources that need linking, exact locations, name of linked elements, etc. The amount of data would be overwhelming and need to be in a useful format. If we, the user, can somehow participate with Logos in the process of linking elements between resources, a la SETI, I would think that this would save some time and computing cost, even if Logos staff needs to review the results.
It's a challenging task for sure.
We're not talking about adding hyperlinks the way a Wikipedia article might have, which would direct you to another page about that topic. We're talking about actual citations of another work that were embedded in one work. A footnote or a parenthetical reference within the text. And yes, of course in the print versions these would never have been citations of books that would be published later, only books that had been published previously. But in many cases, Logos brings out in digital format a resource that is older in print after it has already produced digital versions of resources that cite that older resource. If I later buy the original source that some commentary I already owned was referring to and would like to go look up the quote in context, I'd want to be able to click on the citation in my commentary and jump to the appropriate spot in the original source. This will be particularly true of journal articles and ancient texts. The Talmuds which are currently under development will be a huge benefit to have links become live for. But unless someone goes back through and retags all the old resources which had references to the Talmuds, this isn't going to happen. I do recall a Logos employee writing a post about how they do anticipate doing the work for the Talmuds in particular; this is one of the selling points that made the Talmud such an attractive resource to buy and why it soared through the 100% mark so quickly. So I do hope they keep their promise.
They probably decide on which other resources to add links to/from based on the number of customers who own them. But I do recall some disappointment being expressed over some recent new resources that were published with dead links to existing resources in Logos format. That seems very wrong to me. The reason given was that they didn't want to delay shipment any longer to get the tagging done, but the problem is, once it's out the door, the motivation to do the tagging goes down exponentially.
I also seem to recall they were looking into ways of making tagging a more automated process, but it's extremely tricky because different authors will use different abbreviations for commonly known works, and they'd have to anticipate all of those possiblities ahead of time to properly automate it. It still would take a human being reading through every book to look for all the possible variants. So automation wouldn't save a huge amount of time. They'e also said that crowdsourcing isn't really an option for this kind of work. However I think they could be more creative and open to this possibility. It is solveable. For example, a user could propose a link by creating it within their own library using a tool Logos could provide. It would not be released to the public until it got 5 votes from other users saying "yes, this link is correct." Users could peruse the list of proposed user-generated link additions every week or so looking for ones to vote for. There would be a way within Logos to bring up this list (it could be downloaded from the server on demand) without it actually yet affecting the resources in your Library that the links were between. Logos is already crowdsourcing a lot of their QA with the beta test program, so it seems to me they could crowdsource a bit of their QA for tagging in this way, too.
And when they do, I'm guessing there'll be as many or more complaints about the download as there are "thank you"s for the updated content, based on our track record. [:(]
That's the trick isn't it? Balance the downloads with the need for content upgrades?
And thanks, Rosie for your gentleness in reminding us of the size of the problem!
Why am I posting? I'm a little concerned at the tone of the posts, given that Logos is really caught in a conflicting needs from users.
Brilliant answers?
Not here. But maybe there could be something similar to the "report a typo" function--"Report a Link" that'd allow us to establish the link in our resources, but also send it (or at least report it) to Logos for potential inclusion for everyone. If the function to establish a link between resources will exist in the PBB, maybe it could be adapted for this "Report a Link" function.
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Bill
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I always use the Report a Typo function for these (as well as for links that point to the wrong place). Then in the "Note" section I point out the lack of hyperlink to the correct resource.
The more of these they get, the more they'll know which ones we think need the most attention.
Help links: WIKI; Logos 6 FAQ. (Phil. 2:14, NIV)
I'm not sure that's entirely fair. The reason for our investment in Logos is substantially due to the way that the resource link with one another. The difficulty here is that we just don't know what Logos is doing about this. We've had some reassurance that major works like AYBD are being updated, but we don't know the policy on new resources.
What we need to know is:
In fairness, the answer to (2) often seems to be "yes". I just checked Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God, and that seems to link in all the right places. I also checked entries in the Zondervan bundle which seemed also to link correctly. This is necessary, but nonetheless really appreciated.
But the answer to (1) seems to be an unspoken "no", except in very limited circumstances. If so, that's a real shame, and one that diminishes the value of Logos. My concern is that if this work isn't done when resources are released, it will never be done. If it's too much work now, it's not going to get any easier with the passage of time.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!