Resource maintenance / missing links...
From our text development team...
As several of you have correctly observed, the single task of attempting to add links from every existing resource to every possible new resource is an overwhelming one and has the potential to be prohibitively expensive. We are neither ignoring the problem nor throwing up our hands, however. Several months ago, we created a dedicated team to assess the multitude of possible updates that could be done to our existing resources. As we have discovered, this is not limited to simply adding links or correcting typos. With the increased functionality and features of Logos 4, we are considering updates to metadata, heading fields, page numbering, biblio milestones, image tagging, headwords and other issues. The team has been creating tools to analyze our resources so that we can prioritize and automate as much of the updating as possible. They have also been drafting recommendations for automating the updating tasks and we are in the process of developing tools for that purpose. After these processes and tools are prototyped and tested, we will be contracting out the vast majority of the manual aspect of the work in order to accelerate the updates to our most critical resources.
While some work has been done on typo corrections, we have run into a significant delay because the system we use to store the typo reports was not designed to scale up to the massive number of resources and users that we are now trying to accommodate. We are in the process of evaluating some different solutions to this problem, but it will be awhile before we will likely have a better system in place.
One issue that is of immediate concern is the "missing links" reported in newly published resources. With very few exceptions, we intend to create every possible link to existing resources when we publish a new resource. The specific examples in this thread are being investigated and will be corrected. We will also be reviewing the typo reports for "missing link" comments in newly published resources. If you have specific examples that you would like to share with us, please add them to this thread or start a new one and we will give those immediate attention.
The thoughtful and helpful tone of this thread is most encouraging and we want you all to know that we are listening and hard at work to make the improvements that you have suggested. We can certainly do a better job of communicating what we are working on and will look for ways to provide that information to all our users.
Comments
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Many thanks for this reassurance. I can appreciate the near impossibility of this task but am hopeful that with Logos' genius at work a manageable solution that gives us a good chunk of what we'd like may be coming.
BTW: I hope everyone at Logos took this as affirmation of the special value that you have build into your resources.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Bob Pritchett said:
One issue that is of immediate concern is the "missing links" reported in newly published resources. With very few exceptions, we intend to create every possible link to existing resources when we publish a new resource. The specific examples in this thread are being investigated and will be corrected. We will also be reviewing the typo reports for "missing link" comments in newly published resources. If you have specific examples that you would like to share with us, please add them to this thread or start a new one and we will give those immediate attention.
Bob, I'm not sure if the TNTC/TOTC is considered a "new" resource (it came out at the beginning of this year), but it has a special problem that links between Tyndale Commentary volumes don't work correctly. I reported it six months ago in this thread: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/13493/104311.aspx -- The problem still exists.
MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540
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Bob, thanks so much for posting this. I presume the thread you're referring to is Love all the
new resources...butIn that thread I said:
Mark Barnes said:…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…Pillar on Ephesians is not new, but it was definitely published after WBC, Calvin and Hendriksen.
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Bob,
Have you considered crowd-sourcing like ancestry.com?
Mark
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Although it's not strictly a linking problem, the very recent Bible Studies by Deissman had no headword index for the Greek words referred to in chapters two and six. Although it's not a dictionary, these are dictionary-type articles, and should have been indexed so that they appeared in Parallel Resource menus, and in the Bible Word Study.
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Mark A. Smith said:
Many thanks for this reassurance. I can appreciate the near impossibility of this task but am hopeful that with Logos' genius at work a manageable solution that gives us a good chunk of what we'd like may be coming.
BTW: I hope everyone at Logos took this as affirmation of the special value that you have build into your resources.
Peace, Mark! *smile*
Well-written post! Thank you ... I echo your sentiments ...........
Philippians 4: 4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand..........
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Here's an example from a brand new resource (released today!). Sadly, it's missing a few links. The resource is God's Indwelling Presence. It's missing links to at least three resources:
- Bibliotheca Sacra (4 missing links)
- Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John (10 missing links)*
- Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch (4 missing links)
On the other hand, I'm grateful for the links to Themelios, even though that resource isn't available yet.
* The Westcott problem might be due to a different edition being referred to.
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Mark Barnes said:
Bibliotheca Sacra (4 missing links)
Do you have any resources that link to the Journals? I haven't seen any.
MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540
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God's Indwelling Presence linked to all the other journals (lots of Tyndale and a few JETS). It was just missing BibSac.
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I'm sure that this is a part of the difficulty, but is Logos playing with ways to update the current 10,000 resources as new resources are added to the books available in Logos? I can't begin to imagine the dollars you are looking at to update those 10,000 resources. The thought of them being out of date again when the complete Logos Library is 15,000 resources is heart breaking.
My hat goes off to you for even attempting these things. I think the reason we want more is because we enjoy the taste of what we've already had so much.
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There's another new resource with missing links. This time the Pillar New Testament Commentary on Hebrews, again it's just been released. It's missing links to:
- Heen, E. M., and P. D. W. Krey, eds., Hebrews, ACCS: NT 10
- Peterson, D., ‘Hebrews’, in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition
- Wright, N. T., The Resurrection of the Son of God
That said, I noticed links to JBL, which is encouraging as it hasn't yet come out of prepub!
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Still more missing links in another new resource. This time the Pillar Commentary on Philippians:
- Harris, Murray J. “Appendix: Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament.” Pages 1192–1193 in vol. 3 of NIDNTT
- Louw, Johannes P., and Eugene A. Nida, eds. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains.
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And one more in ZEB:
- Vol 2, pg 577 has a reference to J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon [1879], 146–47, but no link.
- The same page has a reference to NIDOTTE, 1:658–59.
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I run across these broken links from time to time. It seems to me that the "fix" is not going to be in users posting individual occurances of broken links but in writing a program that uses an indexed database (one master list - regularly updated) that identifies all resource links in new products and which compares these links to earlier Logos resources and then embeds the target code where needed. Once there is a master database [fully indexed - however that works: with all the embedded information of the location of the link and the target information] I would think that new resources could be developed along the lines of anticipating full integration into the master list.
I am not PROGRAMMER , but I like to help [:)]. As one who admits ignorance to these matters I blissfully submit these thoughts. I hope they are not too bizarre to those familiar with the fuller dimensions of a massive operation like this.
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On the subject of links ... In Geisler's Systematic Theology, vol. 3 there is a link to the CATHOLIC Church Fathers set (TS in ibid., III.1.9.3–4 ) which does NOT link to the one that comes with the Logos packages
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Ron Corbett said:
link to the CATHOLIC Church Fathers set (TS in ibid., III.1.9.3–4 )
In the Church Fathers themselves there is no difference in the text.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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That would make sense, but I was remarking that the link in Geisler's work directs to the one that I don't have.
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Any updates on these projects? How are the tools coming? Any progress on the typo management solution(s)?
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Ron Corbett said:
On the subject of links ... In Geisler's Systematic Theology, vol. 3 there is a link to the CATHOLIC Church Fathers set (TS in ibid., III.1.9.3–4 ) which does NOT link to the one that comes with the Logos packages
That is a typo. References to the Church Fathers are supposed to be added as References, not hard-coded links. Whoever compiled this resource messed up, as the Early Church Fathers links are horribly inconsistent in this volume.
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Bob, why not let us help with the work and create a report-link tool? These links could then either be automatically added or manually approved. I don't think this is the solution, but certainly a very powerful and accurate one: http://community.logos.com/forums/t/11689.aspx
Jacob Hantla
Pastor/Elder, Grace Bible Church
gbcaz.org0 -
FYI - I have not found one link to the Talmud to be working; for this resource, the links would be very helpful [:D]
For example, the "AYBD" has 704 hits (not sure all should have links), I have not checked them all; though, I have not found one to be working.
God bless you and keep you,
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Ken Avery said:
For example, the "AYBD" has 704 hits (not sure all should have links), I have not checked them all; though, I have not found one to be working.
The AYBD are undergoing a comprehensive linking update.
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Ken Avery said:
Are the links in all the documents to the Talmud being updated also?
No, unfortunately. Logos' policy is that all new resources link to all existing resources. They don't have a policy to update all old resources to link to new resources (though they are doing this for some important titles like AYBD). There was some discussion on it here: http://community.logos.com/forums/t/22987.aspx
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