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R Gustason

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Just curious as to why Accordance has not made such things as Pilgrim's Progress, Dante's Works, Sermon Collections from Jonathan Edwards et.al., Matt Henry's Unabridged Commentary, Geneva Bible, 1611 Authorized Version and many others available as free downloads to your customers?

 

It seems this would be an easy way to win 'points' for customer loyalty by including these "free" public domain works in starter package.

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Just curious as to why Accordance has not made such things as Pilgrim's Progress, Dante's Works, Sermon Collections from Jonathan Edwards et.al., Matt Henry's Unabridged Commentary, Geneva Bible, 1611 Authorized Version and many others available as free downloads to your customers?

 

It seems this would be an easy way to win 'points' for customer loyalty by including these "free" public domain works in starter package.

 

I can't answer for the folks at Oak Tree, but I do know they're always really busy working on making the non-public domain works available for us. Working on the free stuff might not be the best use of their time and resources.

 

However, any of us who are users can access these kinds of public domain works on the web, turn them into user's tools, and upload them to the Accordance Exchange to share with everyone. I've added a few titles myself and have started others that I haven't finished yet.

 

It might even be a worthwhile project to determine which of these public domain titles folks want the most and they could be taken on by various users.

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I can't answer your question, but are you aware of the user-contributed Accordance Exchange?

 

Boom: Rick beat me to it, but at least I provided a link!

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I can't answer your question, but are you aware of the user-contributed Accordance Exchange?

 

Boom: Rick beat me to it, but at least I provided a link!

 

Yes, I am aware of the exchange. Unfortunately it seems as though a lot of others are not as it appears to be minimally used. Would be nice to see professionally done modules posted there. Perhaps I'll give it a shot later.

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Just curious as to why Accordance has not made such things as Pilgrim's Progress, Dante's Works, Sermon Collections from Jonathan Edwards et.al., Matt Henry's Unabridged Commentary, Geneva Bible, 1611 Authorized Version and many others available as free downloads to your customers?

 

It seems this would be an easy way to win 'points' for customer loyalty by including these "free" public domain works in starter package.

 

Thanks for the request, Ryan. Most of the items listed are available in one of the levels of the Library collection. We're open to discussion on these levels, and actually are in the midst of marketing discussions on product structuring.

 

That said, the Exchange is still the best option for now. Even "free" PD resources can require extensive development effort, and as Rick M. alluded to, our team is indeed hard at work to bring you the latest titles from a host of publishers.

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I would agree that I do NOT want the very limited human capital resources at Accordance working on PD materials.

 

What I would like to see is:

  1. Access to better (however complex) authoring tools for dedicated non-employees to prepare texts
  2. No intermediary posting for the Exchange

 

I've heard the typical "it's too much for normal users" reasoning before, but I think you have a core of users who are not "normal". Maybe make it something you only provide access to people you "trust" and train them in person only at or around the user conference or the presentations/training sessions.

 

I think you'll get more content for minimal investment, and your users get access to resources in Accordance they'd likely never have.

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I would agree that I do NOT want the very limited human capital resources at Accordance working on PD materials.

 

What I would like to see is:

  1. Access to better (however complex) authoring tools for dedicated non-employees to prepare texts
  2. No intermediary posting for the Exchange

 

I've heard the typical "it's too much for normal users" reasoning before, but I think you have a core of users who are not "normal". Maybe make it something you only provide access to people you "trust" and train them in person only at or around the user conference or the presentations/training sessions.

 

I think you'll get more content for minimal investment, and your users get access to resources in Accordance they'd likely never have.

 

I wouldn't go so far as saying that we have 'very limited' resources (we just hired another full-time member of our dev team and have quite a few spread out over the globe working on specialized projects). And, we will work on PD materials over time as they fit within our goals to create unique resources, or to bolster our Library collection. The Christmas Collection is a perfect example. But as I said, our focus is more on new(er) titles.

 

I do agree that we should have a more streamlined process for submission and release on the AX (sounds catchy doesn't, it?), and we can discuss that. Thanks for the suggestion.

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If I can jump in here again, I would guess that "intermediary posting" (as Mike called it) exists for Exchange modules because Oak Tree wants to promote the sharing of non-commercial files, but doesn't want to be party to files that infringe upon copyright. Thus each file gets screened before it gets posted. The Accordance Exchange actually started as a separate, non-Oak website years ago (I can't remember now who started it) but later was taken in-house by Oak Tree resulting in the site that JP linked to earlier in this thread.

 

Of course that's not to preclude anyone from making their own Accordance user tools available, I suppose, on their own website; but I would think they'd still get greater circulation from an Oak Tree-sponsored site than an independent one.

 

I've said this before in a similar discussion, but I like the search capabilities in Accordance so much that if I could, I'd save every document I have in an Accordance user tool format. Unfortunately, a lot of my own teaching notes and occasional sermons often have tables or graphics, which keeps me from using them here. We live in such a visual society that most of us who teach or preach use some kind of presentation software. So, if I have a chart that I'm displaying in Keynote, but have notes separate (as opposed to having them the presenter notes section of the software), I usually put that same chart in my notes. Unfortunately, that cannot translate to an Accordance user tool, although I wish it could.

 

Therefore, I use DEVONthink for a lot of the kinds of documents I can't keep in Accordance. For me, it's a next best solution. That's the defacto software I use for organizing and searching through literally tens of thousands of PDFs I've accumulated over the years. Often I use Accordance and DEVONthink simultaneously.

 

But back to the subject at hand--free modules. I believe there's a lot of potential here, specifically regarding public domain works, but I think that rather than asking the Oak Tree staff to do it, a number of us could commit to converting at least one public domain work per month (or whatever frequency works best for each person) and then uploading those to the exchange.

 

When we were at the SBL Shootout, someone in the audience asked about the possibility of searching through Dickens' works for allusions from the Bible. Of course, Accordance has a couple of methods for looking for allusions: the infer search and to a lesser extent, the fuzzy search. Unfortunately, right now those particular search commands don't work in anything but versified texts. But perhaps eventually that kind of functionality could be added so that they work with all modules, including user tools.

 

We've already got a little bit of Dickens in Accordance via the Christmas Classics General Tool. But it also wouldn't be unfeasible for a project to make all of Dickens' works available for download in the Accordance Exchange if there were enough people interested. And there's lots of potential here. My undergraduate degree was in English, so I have a number of interests on the relationship of the Bible to literature. Shouldn't we at least have the top 100 or so classic works of literature available in Accordance?

 

In keeping with that idea, I turned Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a user tool this morning. I converted it from the HTML public domain text from the Gutenberg Project, and it took me all of about 20 minutes to clean it up, which mainly consisted of removing references to illustrations and making certain all the chapters displayed in the browser window. I've already uploaded it to the Exchange, but I don't know how soon it will be made available. If you want it right now, I could email it to you.

 

On a related note, this past year alone, I got pegged to teach six sections of an introductory philosophy course. I'd love it if Oak Tree branched out into this kind of area, especially since classical philosophy begins in ancient Greece. It would be wonderful if tagged original language texts of classical philosophers were paired with English translations. However, I realize this is not currently the main focus of Accordance, so I'm not going to hold my breath. Nevertheless, though, there are a lot of these public domain texts out there (in both Greek and English), and there's no real reason why some of us couldn't significantly add to the Exchange and make large numbers of texts, in a variety of fields of study, available to use in Accordance.

 

Just some thoughts. I'd be interested to hear what others think about this.

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Just curious as to why Accordance has not made such things as Pilgrim's Progress...

 

I just uploaded The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan to the Accordance Exchange. It took me about ten minutes to prepare. Since I imported an HTML file, even the scripture references are hyperlinked. I didn't check all of them, but the ones I did check were correct.

 

It should eventually be available for download on the Accordance Exchange, but if you want it now, email me at RMansfield@mac.com.

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I would certainly commit to at least one per month. A coordinated effort to attack specific groups of etexts to be converted would be fantastic. Dickens, Shakespeare, church fathers, old but great grammars or lexicons, etc... so much possibility, for me it is more just an agreement to start in on a particular set.

 

If we could gain some momentum, I would go so far as to suggest a kind of "easy install" that can optionally point to the accordance exchange content (my company's java IDE does this for GPL extensions).

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I would certainly commit to at least one per month. A coordinated effort to attack specific groups of etexts to be converted would be fantastic. Dickens, Shakespeare, church fathers, old but great grammars or lexicons, etc... so much possibility, for me it is more just an agreement to start in on a particular set.

 

If we could gain some momentum, I would go so far as to suggest a kind of "easy install" that can optionally point to the accordance exchange content (my company's java IDE does this for GPL extensions).

I too would be interested in doing something like this. I think there does need to be some way of knowing what is being worked on so that we do not duplicate.

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Mike,

 

Listing AX modules in Easy Install is actually a fantastic idea. I'm not sure how soon we'd be able to implement it, but I love the idea for getting these texts into the hands of our users better (and on iOS devices).

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I do agree that we should have a more streamlined process for submission and release on the AX (sounds catchy doesn't, it?), and we can discuss that. Thanks for the suggestion.

That's fantastic, what about the betterment of the tool capabilities and the authoring tools?

 

How about letting us get some of the old (but fabulous) ICC commentaries in as Reference Tools (we all know user notes are totally insufficient for a variety of reasons)?

 

This would differentiate Accordance from others and be a great USP to help people make the choice or switch!

 

Would you be open to a discussion about the gaps in user-created content?

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Listing AX modules in Easy Install is actually a fantastic idea. I'm not sure how soon we'd be able to implement it, but I love the idea for getting these texts into the hands of our users better (and on iOS devices).

 

Okay, a Devil's Advocate question here: If the Exchange modules were added to Easy Install, would all titles remain in the list, even if the user didn't want to download and install each one?

 

I have an issue with that right now. I don't want to install the Atlas Sampler. I don't need it or want it since I have the full Atlas. There ought to be a box I could check to hide it. If that were done for Exchange modules, it might be a workable solution, but I wouldn't want a number of titles I didn't want cluttering up the list.

 

BTW, I have the same issue in the Updates pane. I have two modules that I don't want to update, so I always have to be careful to uncheck them before I update anything else. It would be nice if I could hide items there, too.

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Okay, a Devil's Advocate question here: If the Exchange modules were added to Easy Install, would all titles remain in the list, even if the user didn't want to download and install each one?

 

I have an issue with that right now. I don't want to install the Atlas Sampler. I don't need it or want it since I have the full Atlas. There ought to be a box I could check to hide it. If that were done for Exchange modules, it might be a workable solution, but I wouldn't want a number of titles I didn't want cluttering up the list.

 

BTW, I have the same issue in the Updates pane. I have two modules that I don't want to update, so I always have to be careful to uncheck them before I update anything else. It would be nice if I could hide items there, too.

Completely agree with the current state. We desperately need an "Ignored" state that doesn't show by default.

 

My point is that once the content on the "AX" becomes sufficiently valuable, everyone would be better served by an integrated install experience.

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Completely agree with the current state. We desperately need an "Ignored" state that doesn't show by default.

 

My point is that once the content on the "AX" becomes sufficiently valuable, everyone would be better served by an integrated install experience.

 

I agree with all of the above comments. This could be really beneficial. I have started to go through some of the works on www.earlychristianwritings.com and convert them to Accordance format such as the Passion Narrative and The Epistle of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrnaeans. I am a web master and I'm currently toying with the idea of starting an Accordance User Modules site.

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I agree with all of the above comments. This could be really beneficial. I have started to go through some of the works on www.earlychristianwritings.com and convert them to Accordance format such as the Passion Narrative and The Epistle of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrnaeans. I am a web master and I'm currently toying with the idea of starting an Accordance User Modules site.

 

Just as an FYI, The Epistle of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrnaeans already exists in more than one Accordance module--both in tagged Greek and English translation and in the Church Fathers collection. I'd hate to see you work hard on modules that are already available.

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