New Feature: Factbook Bible Books
What is it?
Get information on every book in the Bible—fast. Learn about authorship, genre, setting, form, content, and more for all 66 books in the Bible.How does it work?
The Factbook is a growing library that allows user to add supplemental volumes for special areas of interest. Two of the supplemental volumes available for Logos 6 are the Bible Facts Notable People and the Bible Facts Book Guides. These volumes contain new data as well as data tagged in commentaries, dictionaries, introductions, biographies, and other related works. The Bible Book Guides present users with survey-level information on each book of the Bible.
Get instant information on every book in the Bible. The new Factbook Bible Book Guides dataset brings together the best information from across your library, and offers overviews of every biblical book, including themes, events, origin, authorship, genre, meaning, and much more.
Get links to dictionary articles for further exploration, add professionally designed slides to your next presentation, put each book in historical context by jumping straight to the Timeline, and much more.
This new dataset is your launching pad for in-depth biblical exploration.
Where can I learn more?
This video shows the Bible Book Guide in action.
And this video gives a little more context to the Factbook in general.
How do I get it?
This feature is included in Core Crossgrade and all Bronze-level packages and higher.
all Crossgrades and all Base Package levels that include this feature.
RD3
Logos Marketing | ray.deck@logos.com
Comments
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I absolutely LOVE this feature! One of my favorites of L6.
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Great feature, although the list of options needs some refinement as typing "1 Timothy" doesn't produce any results for this book. Instead you have to type "first letter to timothy"...
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Paul Meathrel said:
Great feature, although the list of options needs some refinement as typing "1 Timothy" doesn't produce any results for this book. Instead you have to type "first letter to timothy"...
We plan to fix this in a future update.
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Paul Meathrel said:
Great feature, although the list of options needs some refinement as typing "1 Timothy" doesn't produce any results for this book. Instead you have to type "first letter to timothy"...
We plan to fix this in a future update.
I hope you can make more options for each book. It's like a guessing game: "Book of Habakkuk" but "Gospel of John" but "Epistle of Romans". There should be an easy way or at least prompt options to find what you need.
Fred Greco
Senior Pastor, Christ Church PCA, Katy, TX
Windows 10 64-bit; Logos 7.1 SR-2 (Reformed Platinum)0 -
Fred Greco said:
I hope you can make more options for each book. It's like a guessing game: "Book of Habakkuk" but "Gospel of John" but "Epistle of Romans". There should be an easy way or at least prompt options to find what you need.
Agreed. When I type in "Peter" I can get smart search results for the witnesses who witnessed his denial or information about his sword, but the option for the books of either 1st or 2nd Peter are not listed.
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I was excited this morning when I saw the updates to several databases. I was hoping this would fix the problem, but it seems we must wait for a future update.
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Fred Greco said:
I hope you can make more options for each book. It's like a guessing game: "Book of Habakkuk" but "Gospel of John" but "Epistle of Romans". There should be an easy way or at least prompt options to find what you need.
Prefixing the search with "<topic" often helps eg
It doesn't work for all cases - "<topic john" doesn't find the Gospel of John, for example
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It would be great to have one facebook for the entire bible, among more general information lists links to all the other bible books' factbook.
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Okay ... I'll meet expectations ... Who's entire Bible? I nominate the Ethiopian Tawedo Orthodox Church's ... although some Armenian Bibles would be fun too.
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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MJ. Smith said:
Okay ... I'll meet expectations ... Who's entire Bible? I nominate the Ethiopian Tawedo Orthodox Church's ... although some Armenian Bibles would be fun too.
good point :-). I guess having links to discussing the various canons would work but getting into listing all the books would get more complicated. You could have one factbook that links to factbooks on each canon composition, that links to the books in that canon. Or we could make a reading list.
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Ryan B said:
I was excited this morning when I saw the updates to several databases. I was hoping this would fix the problem, but it seems we must wait for a future update.
It will need a program update to fix this.
In the meantime, if you're stuck you can use your topic guide. and then click the factbook link from there. Bible books are more likely to appear at the top of the list in the topic guide, and even if they don't it will be in the list somewhere. Factbook shows you much fewer options in the list.
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!
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Ohhh great workaround! Thanks for the tip Mark.
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Halo Hound said:
It would be great to have one facebook for the entire bible, among more general information lists links to all the other bible books' factbook.
Our long-term vision is to curate Factbook pages (a bit more like Wikipedia), so each page will have a distinct character and draw in additional material for its particular subject. That will enable us to go beyond the current standardized report. For example, the Factbook page on Tribes of Israel should list them and link to their individual pages. But this is an enormous editorial task, so it will be some time before we get there.
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Are the flags in the events section going to be eventually linked to the timeline tool?
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Sean Boisen said:
Our long-term vision is to curate Factbook pages (a bit more like Wikipedia), so each page will have a distinct character and draw in additional material for its particular subject. That will enable us to go beyond the current standardized report. For example, the Factbook page on Tribes of Israel should list them and link to their individual pages. But this is an enormous editorial task, so it will be some time before we get there.
sorry, but this "project" is nothing but "favorites" albeit more visual. From what I see on the upgrade page it's price is $0.00. I would hate for you to spend "enormous editorial" resources and give it away for free, when users can do their own work (and definitely get more out of it).
I am for Logos to assist me in Bible study. I am against Logos (editorial team) doing the Bible study for me.
Keep it simple, keep it automated and spend your resources elsewhere
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toughski said:
sorry, but this "project" is nothing but "favorites" albeit more visual. From what I see on the upgrade page it's price is $0.00. I would hate for you to spend "enormous editorial" resources and give it away for free, when users can do their own work (and definitely get more out of it).
I am for Logos to assist me in Bible study. I am against Logos (editorial team) doing the Bible study for me.
Keep it simple, keep it automated and spend your resources elsewhere
One of our primary product strategies in assisting users with Bible study is to provide convenient access to the information in their library. By all means, you should directly study the text and do your own analysis wherever possible. But many people lack the time, background, or inclination to do it all for themselves, and so many of our datasets offer them our editorial analysis in a wide variety of areas (linguistic, topical, practical, or others).
You could argue (and some have) that parsing the morphology of the Greek text, or collecting cross-references, is "doing Bible Study for you". If you don't want that analysis, or if you don't agree with it, you certainly don't have to use it. But for many people, this is a key value that they can't get anywhere else. That includes identifying the most important information about particular subjects and the most useful library content that's related: we want to make that information easily available. I see that as very different from just listing favorites.
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Sean Boisen said:
One of our primary product strategies in assisting users with Bible study is to provide convenient access to the information in their library.
What is the usage/workflow difference between Basic Search, Topic Guide and Bible Facts/Factbook?
What frustrates me is that often I look up words or concepts that exist as headwords in ISBE or other dictionaries for example, but they've been excluded from BibleFacts/Factbook, so I have to look things up in multiple places in Logos, instead of one.
BibleFacts/Factbook seems as a perfect candidate to "absorb" all dictionaries in one's Library and be the "front" for them, but SMARTER, utilizing Logos Controlled Vocabulary, being more visual, etc.
Sean Boisen said:But many people lack the time, background, or inclination to do it all for themselves, and so many of our datasets offer them our editorial analysis in a wide variety of areas (linguistic, topical, practical, or others).
I have a major theological problem with your philosophy, but would leave it for another forum.
Sean Boisen said:That includes identifying the most important information about particular subjects and the most useful library content that's related: we want to make that information easily available. I see that as very different from just listing favorites.
you misunderstood me: I meant USERS identifying the most important information (to them) about particular subjects, and the most useful library content (to them), and using Favorites feature to do it.
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toughski said:
What frustrates me is that often I look up words or concepts that exist as headwords in ISBE or other dictionaries for example, but they've been excluded from BibleFacts/Factbook, so I have to look things up in multiple places in Logos, instead of one.
Examples?
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!
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toughski said:Sean Boisen said:
One of our primary product strategies in assisting users with Bible study is to provide convenient access to the information in their library.
What is the usage/workflow difference between Basic Search, Topic Guide and Bible Facts/Factbook?
What frustrates me is that often I look up words or concepts that exist as headwords in ISBE or other dictionaries for example, but they've been excluded from BibleFacts/Factbook, so I have to look things up in multiple places in Logos, instead of one.
BibleFacts/Factbook seems as a perfect candidate to "absorb" all dictionaries in one's Library and be the "front" for them, but SMARTER, utilizing Logos Controlled Vocabulary, being more visual, etc.
That's exactly what we want Factbook to be: the first point of entry for searching topical/reference material. We'd also like to be more like the search box on Google: you can look for whatever you want, and we'll try to return the best information without bothering you to decide "is that a person? a topic? a preaching theme?".
So I'd suggest the new workflow for topics and reference material is:
- search in Factbook
- If that gives you all you need, great: if not, click over to Topic Guide, Sermon Starter Guide, or another Tool for more details
Searching for a particular word is even broader, since that could be any one of a million different possibilities. So I'd suggest Everything Search for this: we'll still tell you about matching Factbook pages, show Atlas results, etc.
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- tetragrammaton
- Pentecost
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Interesting. A Media search for the same turns up one media hit ( try to find the angel!) and nothing online. My Library turns up 54 hits, none of which look like angels in my bedtime story books.
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Can I use cherub as an example as to why these are not currently working?
Currently, in the entity database there are multiple entities labelled 'cherub'. Firstly, there's a topic, then there are two people, and thirdly, there's a place. One of the people, and the place are clearly not relevant to the angelic cherub, so we'll ignore them.
In your screenshot, you're seeing the entry for the person (the factbook entry for the topic is below). In an ideal world, the topic (Cherubim) and the person (Cherub, Cherubim) would be marked in the database as equivalent. If that had happened, then all the Factbook entries for the topic and person would be merged into one page. In other words, then the Factbook would be exactly what you want - a one-stop shop for everything. You won't have to go to different tools for people, places, things, events, topics, themes, etc. You can go to the Factbook for everything.
Clearly, in this case, it's not working for you. But that's a side-effect of the ambition of the project (which requires merging multiple databases into one), not a flaw in the concept itself. In this case, it's probably partly occurred because the names of the topic and person are different and their equivalence has been overlooked.
This problem will crop up, particularly with a new dataset. I've noticed (and reported) several similar examples. But it's relatively easy to fix, and I'm sure that won't take too long. When it is fixed, Factbook will be the one-stop shop you want.
As for the other topics you mentioned. Tetragrammaton works fine for me, as does Pentecost. Indeed, Pentecost brings together the topic and the event into one, obviating the need to go to Bible Events and the Topic Guide as we would have had to in L5.
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!
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Going back to the main topic of Factbook for Bible books: The book of Deuteronomy doesn't seem to be included:
Doing a search on topic guide provides a link to 'Factbook on Book of Deuteronomy'
But all it takes you to is a Factbook entry about the copy of Deuteronomy mentioned in Odes
The other books in the Pentateuch all have separate entries.
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Stephen Steele said:
Going back to the main topic of Factbook for Bible books: The book of Deuteronomy doesn't seem to be included:
This is already fixed for an upcoming version of the software (the fix didn't make it into 6.0a unfortunately).
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