Improvements to the Vatican II resources

[jlm]

One of the first things I acquired for Accordance are the texts of Vatican II in Latin and English. The texts are well chosen: AAS is the official Latin text, and Flannery's edition is the best translation. However, I soon noticed that it is inconvenient to look up texts in them. The normal way of citing these documents is by section number, e.g., "Lumen gentium 16" or "LG 16". The section numbers are present in the text, but are not tagged in any way, so there is no way to quickly navigate to a particular document and section number. The table of contents divides the documents into chapters, which are rarely used in citing the documents.

 

It would not be enough to simply tag the existing section numbers, because they are relative to the document, and the module contains 16 documents. Instead, in place of a section number like "11.", you could put the initials of the document and the section number (e.g., "[DV 11]"), tagging the whole bracketed range as a Section field. This would make it possible to quickly look up citations by searching the new Section field, and would also make it possible to link to sections in other resources (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Catholic Commentary of Sacred Scripture, …) and in user content.

 

Further, although page numbers are marked with numbers in brackets in the Vatican II Latin module, they are not tagged as page numbers, and are consequently not used by the "Copy as citation" function. Please tag the page numbers. If "copy as citation" produced something like the following, it would be genuinely useful: “Divinitus revelata, quae in Sacra Scriptura litteris continentur et prostant, Spiritu Sancto afflante consignata sunt” (Vatican II, Dei verbum 11, in AAS 58 (1966) 822).

Edited February 24, 2020 by jlm

[Fabian]

+1

 

I even would love if I can tag the German ones I did as a User Tool for the CIC17 and 83. 

[jlm]

"3/4/20 Update: The update to version 3.0 contains significant updates. Page numbers were added, as well as the ability to search by section."

 

Thank you very much for adding section numbers. This is a great help. The web pages for the two resources (Vatican II-L cited above, see also Vatican II-E) also say page numbers were added, but I don't see a Page Numbers field when I go to search the resource. Is this something you plan to add, or is there some mistake?

Edited March 7, 2020 by jlm

[jlm]

Fabian’s recent like reminded me of this post. I wrote the above over two years ago because I wanted to clarify this issue before I wrote a review talking about how useful these modules now are. But I never got the clarification, and forgot about the review. I suppose the fact that there’s still no Page Numbers field means that the notice on those web pages was (and still is) in error.

 

[R. Mansfield]

I find it unusual that we would add a note in 2020 that page numbers were added if they weren't. It makes me wonder if the new version wasn't uploaded to the server.

 

@Mark Allison, do you mind looking into this?

[jlm]

A new version with section numbers was uploaded. Maybe “page numbers” was supposed to be “section numbers.“

[jlm]

The Latin Vatican II module actually does have lots of page numbers in square brackets for Acta Apostolicae Sedis, but not all documents have them, and they’re not tagged as Page Numbers.