Biblical People - Elijah for instance

Mike, 

I don't quite understand your query.  Is this what you mean?  When I click Elijah I get the correct dictionary open up on the proper entry for Elijah.

Fernando

Mike

Well, I can't get Easton's to show on the list either.  I tried to "prioritize" it in the library but had no effect.  

I find that the entry to the left changes when I scroll the window but cannot get the complete text to appear, BTW, what is the source of that text?  If I click (or double-click) on it nothing happens...  Any thoughts?

Fernando

Mike Binks said:

Though I am very disappointed that the brand new Zondervan resources are not yet so tagged.

The post I referred to pre-dates the Zondervan releases, I think. Sean Boisen would be the only person able to answer the question as to why they weren't tagged for topics when they were created.

In Biblical People, there's a link to the altar in Biblical Things. On my machine the initial image was wrong, but it very quickly corrected itself.

 tried to paste it in my original post without success. I forgot you have to attach it. First, I looked up Elijah. Here is the result (no problem).

Then I clicked on Elijah's Altar with this result:

As an American and loyal Logos fan, let me throw in my two cents on this.

I have been a Logos user since the late 90's, and I intend to continue to be. But having said this, I must confess that I do understand the frustration Mike Binks is expressing in his posts and, having read a number of his posts, I think you would agree that he has not come across as an intemperate participant in the forums.

Neither do I wish to be perceived as fussy or cranky, but I, too, am frustrated because I recently purchased a number of Zondervan's Encyclopedias. I was unaware that these works had not been tagged with LCV yet.

One of the most fundamental advantages of Bible software is the research it does for you by bringing to your attention ALL the pertinent material from your resources that is related to your search request.  Considering this, it is not unreasonable for us to expect that the software we are purchasing will be "road ready" for providing us all that our resources contain about a given subject we are researching. Essentially,  this is a feature we paid for but do not yet possess.

At the very least, this limitation should have been made known; then your customers could decide whether they wish to pay for a resource that is not yet capable of doing all that they expect it to do, when typing in a search for information.

One of the things I love about Logos is the amount of books that are available electronically. I am astonished at how many resources you all have available. Having said this, and again, this comes from a loyal Logos customer, instead of using so much manpower to rush new material into electronic format, which resources are not even LCV tagged, I believe that your customers, and even Logos, would be better served by assigning more manpower to tagging already released resources, which people have already purchased with their hard-earned dollars!

Of course, it is your company and your choice, but for what it is worth, this Logos customer thinks that we have a right to know what limitations exist in the books/software we are purchasing.

Still a Logos fan,

B. J. Clarke

BJClarke said:

One of the things I love about Logos is the amount of books that are available electronically. I am astonished at how many resources you all have available. Having said this, and again, this comes from a loyal Logos customer, instead of using so much manpower to rush new material into electronic format, which resources are not even LCV tagged, I believe that your customers, and even Logos, would be better served by assigning more manpower to tagging already released resources, which people have already purchased with their hard-earned dollars!

I feel the same way, as another long-time loyal Logos customer. There are way too many pre-pubs already in the pipeline for any of us to ever buy them all. I'd much rather see the pre-pub effort slow down some and more people be reallocated to tagging, cleaning up metadata, and fixing typos in existing resources. And I'd like to see a commitment made to not releasing any new resources that aren't fully tagged to take advantage of the features in Logos 4.

Rosie Perera said:

There are way too many pre-pubs already in the pipeline for any of us to ever buy them all. I'd much rather see the pre-pub effort slow down some and more people be reallocated to tagging, cleaning up metadata, and fixing typos in existing resources.

In an ideal world, yes. But Logos get money for creating pre-pubs. They don't get money tagging, and cleaning up existing resources. In other words, pre-pubs self-fund - you they sell a lot, they can recruit more staff to do the work (or more likely contract out to other providers).

I do agree about the tagging. I've often reported typos when there could be a link to a resource and it's not clickable. I've reported in the forums about untagged resources. But I'm a realist too. I know that the cost of tagging rises exponentially, the more resource we have.

Let's take the Anchor Bible Dictionary (Bob has said that it's being retagged at the moment). I just scanned through about three articles, and just in those three articles it's missing links to Josephus' Works, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Didache, Shepherd of Hermas, the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, the NT pseudepigrapha, TDOT, Philo's Works, History of the Jewish Peoples, ANET, Laws of Hammurabi, Nag Hammadi, and Anchor Bible Commentaries.

When Anchor was published electronically, those resources didn't exist. Now they do. I would dearly like Logos to go back and re-tag ABD to include them. But I would estimate that there are up to 15,000 potential new links just in ABD. In case you dispute that figure, there are nearly 1,500 potential links to Josephus' Antiquites, at least 1,000 Anchor Bible references, nearly 1,000 ANET, and nearly 1,000 Nag Hammadi. And tagging them isn't a minimum wage job, or one that can be contracted out to India. It will probably need to be a Biblical Studies graduate who does the work (or at least does a good part of the work).

Now that's an old resource, and obviously an important one. It needs tagging (in my opinion). But I have to accept that it just isn't practical to go through all 10,000 existing Logos books to see if they should link to any of the other 10,000 Logos books.  And I definitely don't want to have to wait for Logos to do that before I get the pre-pubs I've been waiting for.

Rosie Perera said:

Mark Barnes said:

When Anchor was published electronically, those resources didn't exist. Now they do. I would dearly like Logos to go back and re-tag ABD to include them. But I would estimate that there are up to 15,000 potential new links just in ABD. In case you dispute that figure, there are nearly 1,500 potential links to Josephus' Antiquites, at least 1,000 Anchor Bible references, nearly 1,000 ANET, and nearly 1,000 Nag Hammadi. And tagging them isn't a minimum wage job, or one that can be contracted out to India. It will probably need to be a Biblical Studies graduate who does the work (or at least does a good part of the work).

 

Well, as this problem seems positioned to only get worse in the future, I think they need to come up with a better long-term solution, such as building in the capability to automate some of the tagging based on user-submitted links. If we find a missing link in a resource, we could first go to the place that the link should jump to, create a link using "Copy location as URL," then go select the text that should link to it, right click on it, run some command like the Report typo command, and paste in the link, and then click Submit. Chances are there are lots of Biblical Studies graduates who are users of Logos who are noticing these things and could do a better job of fixing them than a minimum wage contractor in India. And better than leaving them unfixed as well. If the Logos developers write code to automate this, they can remove the possibility of dummies introducing syntax errors in the tagging. Due to the exponential growth nature of this task, it is a prime task to delegate to crowdsourcing.

That's an excellent idea. I know if I would be willing to submit something like that. I'm sure other Logos users would to. 

Bob Pritchett said:

Mike Binks said:

'Titles integrate into custom search reports, Passage Guides, Exegetical Guides, and the other advanced features of Logos Bible Software.'

This is "boilerplate" text that I'm pretty sure we were using long before Logos 4. And I don't think it's untrue -- all of our books do these things. It's a feature of the system.

The LCV is a special, external database that disambiguates terms between various resources. It shows up in a completely separate section of the search results area. While I agree it would be cool for more books to work with it, I think it's quite a stretch to accuse us of deception when a book doesn't. I'm glad you like it -- so do I! -- but it's actually a database of its own, not a baseline feature of our software. It never occurred to me that you'd consider a book not indexed to the LCV to be incomplete.

The "stop putting out pre-pubs when you haven't implemented PBB" type arguments are frustrating. People are not directly interchangeable; we have different skill sets and priorities, many running in parallel. And we have many users with differing "how dare you!" complaints. :-)

The people waiting for Mac feature parity would like all our resources there. Other people want hyperlinks in Anchor fixed. You want LCV tagging on Zondervan titles.

And then there's the "just don't release it until everything is perfect" argument. Except it's up against the "where are the Zondervan resources! we've been waiting 18 years for them, don't delay!" people.

We ARE revisiting books and adding them to the LCV. But this is an editorial process that requires domain knowledge and subjective decision making. We prioritized the books based on number of users who have them, and we're cranking away at them. Three are done but not yet shipped as part of an updated LCV, and we keep working on it. It could take more than a year to address every title; that's why titles in the base packages (which more people have) got attention before pre-pub titles like Zondervan's. Just this week I authorized hiring and training another person to do LCV work, but it's still a huge job. (Theoretically I could hire a dozen people and speed it up more, but it's a very specialized project, would take a while to recruit and train for, and then once we catch up to the backlog, we'd have a lot of people without enough work.)

 I can't imagine that it's preferable to hold every dictionary-like pre-pub for 3-6 months after it's ready to go just to wait for it to be LCV-integrated. But if I don't, are you going to file complaints with the FTC? Would you rather we had just held the Zondervan titles till October? Because there's no way to justify jumping them (with <x> customers) ahead of titles that have already been out for years and have ten times as many users.

(We're also working on pseudo-automated processes to speed it up, but they require enough data to train algorithms -- a point we're just getting to -- and a lot of up-front development.)

Again, I'm glad you appreciate the LCV. But we need some time to catch up on our 18 years and 10,000 released titles!

Thanks, Bob. And sorry for repeating the "hold off on pre-pubs" thing you've probably heard hundreds of times. I wasn't at all meaning to hold off on pre-pubs that people have been waiting for like the Zondervan titles. And I wasn't asking for features before pre-pubs. I realize they are worked on in parallel by different groups of people. But I was operating on the assumption that the same people do the tagging and metadata on pre-pubs would also do it on all the existing resources.

Also I'm a little confused by your math. You said  "It could take more than a year to address every title" and "we need some time to catch up on our 18 years and 10,000 released titles" but then you also said "I can't imagine that it's preferable to hold every dictionary-like pre-pub for 3-6 months after it's ready to go just to wait for it to be LCV-integrated." If it takes 3-6 months to LCV-integrate a dictionary-like resource, how on earth could you possibly do it for all of the existing dictionary-like resources in just over a year? It would take decades, wouldn't it?

We love the LCV! It may not feel like a core part of the product to you, but users can't tell that it's separate. Especially since it replaces functionality that was in L3 that is not in L4 (Topic Browser).

Also, I can't find the other thread where this was pointed out, but Logos already has the capability to do essentially a topic search through all dictionary-like resources using something other than LCV (which only a few dictionaries are integrated into so far). BWS already has this capability:

That's what people want when they say they want topic searching. So, as this other poster suggested, why do some sort of a hybrid solution and make the contents of that list available in the Topic section of the Search until LCV is fully integrated? It would be so much better than what is currently there:

I just typed a long reply, and my browser crashed! I'll be more brief second time around:

First, the most helpful perspective in my view is to see Logos (and every resource) as a constant work in progress. Nothing is finished. Or to put it another way, it's constantly improving. That's demonstrably true of the software but it's also true of many resources, particularly the ones where the contract says Logos is responsible. (And it's worth pointing out that most publishers are not as responsive as Logos, here.)

Second, I think we do need to be reasonable. Can you imagine pre-ordering a Zondervan reference book in print that the advertising said "includes indexes", then
finding out it only had an author index, and not a subject index. Or that the subject index was only 3 pages and you thought it ought to be at least 10. Whilst we might be slightly annoyed, I suspect most of us won't be posting on Zondervan's forum about how terrible this was, and demanding it was put right, preferably immediately.

Third, suggestions that Logos should specify exactly the state of the tagging for every resource would be nice, but it's impractical. Bob has explained how many datatypes they have (though when I edited a list for the Wiki, I found loads more than 95! http://wiki.logos.com/List_of_Datatypes). Plus there's the 'hard links' to potentially thousands of resources that only exist in one edition and you don't need datatypes for. But these still matter.  I just chose a resource entirely at random. It took me less than 2 minutes to find a 'missing' link (it was the NIBC commentary on 1 Peter which mentions a work of Edersheim's on pg 99 - but it's not linked). Does that mean the commentary is 'incomplete'. Yes, but I bet I could find 'missing links' in almost every Logos resource, new and old.) To be frank, I don't use topic searches, nor Biblical Places/Things/People. But I do care about the linking to obscure first- and second- century Jewish and Christian documents. Why should LCV be the test, and not links to the Jewish Pseudepigrapha?

Fourth, what I'm trying to say is that Logos has a choice. There's a law of diminishing returns. Logos could have a small library that's 100% tagged, or large library that's 90%+ tagged. As we don't live in a ideal world with limitless resources, I know which I'd prefer.