10 replies to this topic

[Tom]

I wonder how popular or what impact this might have on Accordance. Seems to be in partnership with Logos.

Interesting concept. Not so sure how accepted it will be. What do you think? Check it out at:

http://www.seminaryl....com/Login.aspx

Tom

[Alistair]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the info. Looks fascinating and promising at first glance, until I realised that the titles on offer appear to be old, out of print, and public domain. Or at least, that's the impression I got from the tour.

The thing that will probably frustrate most people who are used to the functionality and ease of use of Accordance is that the texts appear as scans, and are therefore only useful for reading, for visual information: they cannot be copied and pasted.

Note also that not all of the titles allow searching within the body of the book, although they do say that they will be adding this feature to more and more titles in time. For me this is the killer app. If I'm researching the problem of evil I want to be able to search through the body of the book, not just a list of titles.

Now if all these wonderful resources were to be fully OCR-ed that would be a different matter. Still, it could be a great resource. IMHO one to watch.

HTH

P.S. I don't know what the exact relationship is with Logos, but it doesn't look like any modern titles/Logos modules are available. ???

Edited by Alistair, 03 October 2006 - 05:12 AM.

[Gregory Dietrich]

I love the concept and idea, but Alistairr is right, only Public Domain titles. I don't care to build a library of fluffy, shallow books. Not that all public domain books are fluffy or shallow, but everything in their tour they showed seemed useless to me. I would think in doing a tour they would bust out the best of the best, perhaps not.

Again, awesome idea and concept, would be so much sweeter if actually modules were included.

Edited by Gregory Dietrich, 03 October 2006 - 06:53 PM.

[Robb Brunansky]

The voice of the demo is that of John Fallahee, the guy who does the demos on the Logos web site. He and I went to seminary together and now he works for Logos. He recently was in Wichita and visited our church. He gave me a sample pass to seminarylibrary.com but it has since expired and I never got around to using it. I'm not sure exactly how it's affiliated with Logos, but perhaps they are the ones selling the subscriptions and spearheading the library in conjunction with DTS. It seems kind of like a Google Book Search focused on books at the DTS library.

It's an interesting project, but as others have said, I wouldn't be interested in it. It seems like it would consume more time than it would save and the cost-benefit isn't there.

Edited by Robb Brunansky, 03 October 2006 - 08:36 PM.

[Alistair]

Possibly of interest, some of the scans show the books have been stamped as coming out of a library at Dallas Seminary. (Had to re-read Robb's post above to see that he picked up on this too.) Is this indicative of some kind of relationship with Dallas? Anyone care to guess??

I don't wish to sound mean but I would have thought that a place with the reputation (and resources?) of DTS could do a lot better than this.

Edited by Alistair, 04 October 2006 - 12:21 PM.

[Robb Brunansky]

Possibly of interest, some of the scans show the books have been stamped as coming out of a library at Dallas Seminary. Is this indicative of some kind of relationship with Dallas? Anyone care to guess??

Alistair, see my post above. I believe this is a scan of the DTS library (possibly all the public domain books).

[Alistair]

Thanks Robb.

A step forward would be to OCR the scans into searchable, copiable and pastable text.

Not all books are equal.
Free/public domain doesn't always mean its good.
Neither does it mean that its bad.

Anyway, one to watch, it could develop into something really good.

~A!

[Alistair]

Using a trial account,

1 Searching "problem of evil" gets zero results.

2 Searching "evil" produces a list of results, including "The problem of evil: seven lectures", which of course should have been found in the first search.

3 Clicking on this book title crashes Safari.

Hasty conclusions:
1 It doesn't work
2 It isn't stable

Browsing titles didn't present any problems, however.

So, still plenty of room for improvement.

Edited by Alistair, 05 October 2006 - 05:14 AM.

[Gregory Dietrich]

In reference to the whole DTS thing, remember that Logos bought one of them super scanners and were running it pretty much 24/7 on any public domain book they could get their hands on.

http://72.14.205.104...lient=firefox-a

[Alistair]

Thanks Gregory, that's the missing info we needed. Nice piece of investigation there, Sherlock!

~Alistair

[jpkang]

It looks impressive, though it makes me wonder what the entire system that IBM custom-built for the Vatican looks like.