Publication Date

Where do the library publication dates come from? The Word Biblical Commentary on Matthew 1-3 by Donald Hagner has a publication date of 1998 in my Logos library. But when I check the frontmatter, the copyright is listed as 1993. Why the inconsistency?

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Mark Barnes

Where do the library publication dates come from? The Word Biblical Commentary on Matthew 1-3 by Donald Hagner has a publication date of 1998 in my Logos library. But when I check the frontmatter, the copyright is listed as 1993. Why the inconsistency?

Unfortunately these dates are often inaccurate, especially on resources that were published a number of years ago when Faithlife seemed to be a little less careful than they are today. In this case I suspect that 1998 might have been the date when the electronic edition was first published. I seem to recall the first Logos WBC CD was made available in the late nineties.

It is possible for Faithlife to update these details, so perhaps a staff member might notice this thread and do that. I wouldn't hold your breath, though.

Nick Steffen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972384#Comment_972384

In this case I suspect that 1998 might have been the date when the electronic edition was first published.

I wondered that myself, but the dates were not consistent.

It is possible for Faithlife to update these details, so perhaps a staff member might notice this thread and do that. I wouldn't hold your breath, though.

Thanks. I'm disappointed that this threatens the accuracy of the citation features since the library dates are the ones used there.

Mark, it would be nice to have a crowdsourced library correction feature similar to the typo reporting feature.

Simon’s Brother

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972384#Comment_972384

If memory serves me correctly these resources were originally created by Thomas Nelson rather than FL back in the day when third party publishers could create Logos resources - but I may be wrong.

Simon’s Brother

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972423#Comment_972423

I agree this is an issue for those writing papers and leaves them having to manually check and correct any references they use out of Logos. Getting things fixed via report typo can be a slow process. Metadata corrections like these need to be given a much higher priority.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972423#Comment_972423

Thanks. I'm disappointed that this threatens the accuracy of the citation features since the library dates are the ones used there.

There's some historical context in this post: https://community.logos.com/forums/p/73779/514647.aspx#514647 (basically, when eBooks were a new thing, the eBook edition was considered as a new edition, with a new publication date).

Mark, it would be nice to have a crowdsourced library correction feature similar to the typo reporting feature.

I agree. I'm not sure how much of a priority it is for Faithlife, though. These problems have been around a long time. To be fair, when Logos 4 was first launched it exposed lots of these errors which didn't really matter in earlier versions of Logos, and a few members of staff made hundreds of corrections over the next year or two. But that's dried up more recently.

Bobby Terhune

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972445#Comment_972445

One other thing to consider is that when a book is republished as a paperback book that also changes the publication date. That happened a lot with WBC and the ICC commentaries.

Nick Steffen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972482#Comment_972482

One other thing to consider is that when a book is republished as a paperback book that also changes the publication date. That happened a lot with WBC and the ICC commentaries.

That is entirely plausible, Bobby. However, I would still expect that copyright date (as listed in the frontmatter) to match the publication date listed in the library. Accurate or not, I would still expect it to be consistent.

Bobby Terhune

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972492#Comment_972492

I agree. My problem with newer publication dates is where nothing has changed content wise and that sometimes Logos won't link to it because of the date change.

As a side note, I get frustrated with expected linking to books I own, but were "updated" with only a new forward to the book. And Logos is probably never going to publish the original edition. So by doing that, keylinking is essentially dead for that title.

SineNomine

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972492#Comment_972492

However, I would still expect that copyright date (as listed in the frontmatter) to match the publication date listed in the library.

In some physical books, the (only) copyright date and the (only) publication date don't match.

Jan Krohn

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972482#Comment_972482

One other thing to consider is that when a book is republished as a paperback book that also changes the publication date.

Now, Logos has two fields for publication date for each resource, one of which is the digital publication date.

Consistency would be highly appreciated.

Before we make fixing this a community project, we need to know what the rules of consistency are supposed to be.

Copyright date? Would make sense for citations in academic works. However, what about publich domain works without copyright? What about ancient resources that could even have an unknown date of origin?

Nick Steffen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/972623#Comment_972623

In some physical books, the (only) copyright date and the (only) publication date don't match.

I hadn't realized that. Good to know. I'm more interested in the moment the text officially stabilized rather than when it was printed, so I'm guessing the copyright would seem more helpful from my perspective. Similarly, I really don't really care when the book has republished by a new publisher unless changes have been made to the text.

However, what about publich domain works without copyright? What about ancient resources that could even have an unknown date of origin?

I would love to see a 'date written' field added containing a date (or a date range) when it is believed the text was first written (preferably with citations). So translated works would not show the date of the translation/publication, but the date when the original text was believed to have been written. This would be more appropriate for public domain works.

David Sloan

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/973240#Comment_973240

The dates have proven to be quite problematic for me. When writing articles or book chapters I find myself going back and correcting dates in my footnotes for all of the commentaries I've cited. The Anchor Yale Bible is particularly frustrating. The publication date is typically given as 2008, and if you look at the book info it will give a copyright date of 1974 even for volumes that were published long after that date. Then if you google a volume, such as Louis Martyn's Galatians commentary, you'll find that Amazon gives a publication date of 2005 (the paperback publication date) and Google Books gives the (correct) publication date of 1997. It seems to me that this is far more important than correcting minor typos. A commentaries on Paul published in 1974 is going to differ widely from a commentary published in 2008, and neither date is correct for this particular commentary! If I sort my commentaries by date (something I often do in Logos), Martyn is in the wrong place (as are many other commentaries). This is something Logos should make a higher priority than they have!

Kyle G. Anderson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/989976#Comment_989976

I'm just popping in to say a few things:

I've seen this
There appear to be a couple of floating concerns here but what we're mostly talking about is what we refer to as "Publication Date" which corresponds with the most recent publication year of the source material used to produce the Logos edition. There maybe some outliers that I don't recall off the top of my head but for about the last 5 years we've been as close to sticklers as possible to defaulting to the source material.
The two big examples I've seen (WBC and Anchor) where there is an apparent discrepancy between the publication date that we provide in our citations and what one would expect based upon looking at the front matter of the book either pre-date my time here or pre-date me being involved with any decision making. IIRC there were nebulous "reasons" that were publisher related. I'll try to do some digging and find some answers on that front.
Metadata is incredibly complex and there are truly bizarre and incredibly difficult cases out there.
In the linked thread and in this one there was discussion about the value of a composition-date. This is something we recently re-visited and are trying to find the right rubric to determine. We'll be moving in this direction by using a new field called "era" that will lump a resource into a broad era of composition. We'd like to move more narrow than that but will probably be a slow roll-out as we start with clear-cut cases and move to more difficult cases later. This wouldn't be intended for use in citations but another means to sort your library, create collections, etc.
Metadata is incredibly important to us. It's also something that we have the ability to correct quickly. If you feel something is incorrect please report it on the forums. People also reach me via faithlife.com which works well.

EastTN

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/990011#Comment_990011

... We'll be moving in this direction by using a new field called "era" that will lump a resource into a broad era of composition. ...

Thank you for this - I expect that it will be very useful.