Library Extension for Firefox and Chrome (You'll want this!)

I just discovered Library Extension for Firefox and Chrome, and it really is remarkable. Once you add the extension in either of the those browsers, an icon appears in the toolbar. Click it on to select your available public library and some educational institution ones. If your library system offers it, it will also allow you to connect to Hoopla and OverDrive.

Then, when you are looking for a book in places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads or  Audible, Library Extension will automatically include information on its availability.

For example, I looked up Rasmussen's Zondervan Atlas of the Bible on Amazon, and the page looks like this:

As you can see, a new box has been added on the right telling me that it is available on Hoopla through my county library system. I click on the link, enter my library credentials, and I can start reading the atlas right away. That's pretty excellent. It even works for audiobooks, e.g.:

It's not a perfect system. Depending on which edition or version of a book you select, you will get different results. And your public library probably doesn't carry that technical volume on an advanced biblical topic. And sometimes, you really want to just buy the book and have your own copy!

In any case, this is a handy way to see if your local library has a book you can check out, and sometimes it is even available as an eBook or an audiobook. It's a great way to save some money!
HT: CNET

Free e-book: Passover as Jesus Knew It

http://asorblog.org/free-ebook-anet/#get-your-free-copy-of-the-ancient-near-east-today-special-edition-passover-as-jesus-knew-it

With Passover coming soon, you may be interested in this e-book, Passover as Jesus Knew It. Published in 2014, The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) offers it for free (email needed to get on ASOR list) as a 15 page e-book. Articles include:

• "Jesus' Passover" by James F. Strange
• "Passover as Jesus Knew It" by Helen K. Bond
• "The Last Passover of Jesus" by James H. Charlesworth
• "The Passover and Jesus" by Adela Yarbo Collins
• "Did Jesus Celebrate Passover in Sepphoris" by Eric M. Meyers

HERE is the link, but you may also wish to check out the other free e-books they offer with compilations of articles from the ASOR journal, The Ancient Near East Today.

Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future

 Came across this as I'm wandering the web...  According to the publisher's website:

Mobilizing the Past is a collection of 20 articles that explore the use and impact of mobile digital technology in archaeological field practice. The detailed case studies present in this volume range from drones in the Andes to iPads at Pompeii, digital workflows in the American Southwest, and examples of how bespoke, DIY, and commercial software provide solutions and craft novel challenges for field archaeologists. The range of projects and contexts ensures that Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future is far more than a state-of-the-field manual or technical handbook. Instead, the contributors embrace the growing spirit of critique present in digital archaeology. This critical edge, backed by real projects, systems, and experiences, gives the book lasting value as both a glimpse into present practices as well as the anxieties and enthusiasm associated with the most recent generation of mobile digital tools.

You can buy the book for $20 at Amazon, but why not just download the book or selected chapters for free? Go to the website, where there is a Table of Contents with each downloadable chapter including some supplementary resources. (E.g., videos of presentations.) Nothing specifically biblical, but chapters on Cyprus and Caesarea Maritima. Really remarkable advances in imaging and data collection.

The Scribes by Peter Rodgers

Until 4 October 2012, The Scribes is free as a Kindle download on Amazon. I was reading this book last year and 'enthralled' my students by serially relating the romantic dilemma in the story as it developed. There is Justin (the literalist scribe from Rome who is concerned about exact copying) and Juliana (the scribe from Alexandria who is more open to dynamic renderings). Will they ever be able to find true love when their endings to the Gospel of Mark don't match? Actually, it is a very fun introduction to text criticism and is well worth reading as a historical fiction. (You didn't ever think you'd see "fun" and "textual criticism" together, did you?) Get it for free while you can, but if you miss this offer, it's still worth the $3 regular price as a Kindle download.

HT to Rodney Decker for bringing this to my attention.

Tim Bulkeley Online Book Launch: Not Only a Father

Tim Bulkeley of Sansblogue fame has announced a forthcoming book (10 Oct 2012) you can buy on Amazon (clink on graphic above), but he has also published it online where it can be read for free. This is interesting for a number of reasons.

• At the top of the list, the topic is an important one, and Bulkeley has been working on it for many years.
• It is an experiment in online publishing. I'm interested to see how this turns out for him.
• The online version of the book is organized by chapter sections, but he is using a Wordpress plugin that allows for commenting on the paragraph level that runs alongside the text rather than just commenting at the end of the post.
• He's hoping that this becomes a way for people to engage not only with him as the author but might also serve as a discussion platform for people to talk with each other.

Check it out HERE.

Open Source Textbooks

There's been a progression of comments regarding the creation of a free, online Old Testament textbook. Here's the latest from Mark Goodacre, and you can track back from that post to AKMA. There is a parallel movement in the kindergarten to high school textbook field as well as described in a recent NY Times article, "$200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math." Scott McNealy (of Sun Microsystems fame) is behind a nonprofit, online hub for free textbooks called Curriki. Some aspects of the discussion are the same, but there are differences as well. The article indicates that McNealy with others "shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same." So, from their perspective and with respect to the kind of textbooks they are interested in having, the information is static. It's the cost of textbooks that is the main problem. 

The discussion about a FOSSOTT (free, open source Old Testament textbook) has highlighted some of its advantages for fostering the possibility of including different viewpoints. I.e., we do not necessarily assume in the biblical studies field that all information is static. Further, as James McGrath has outlined, there are a number of potential different models for rethinking what we want in a 'textbook.' 

In response to the NY Times article, Mark Guzdial at the Computing Education Blog weighs in with some considerations regarding quality (in the process and in the material), innovation (Is it possible in an open source approach? Is the innovation in the approach or the textbook?), and sustainability. He is somewhat skeptical about the whole thing...

Personally, I'm thinking changes are not only needed but are inevitable. With the increase of portable reading devices (which still need to get a bit better to substitute for physical textbooks), I think we are headed to all digital. With Mark Goodacre, I would hope we move to something less "texty" and more open, interactive, connected, and social. (I.e., both teachers and students should be able to do more than 'use' a textbook. They should be able to note disagreement, questions, etc.) I've had something like this in mind on a small scale with my Parables of Jesus site, but it is still in its infancy. In any case, we are able to see a future which offers the possibility for some exciting options in creating more flexible (and hopefully also free or low-cost) 'textbooks.' 

Cambridge University Digitization Project

In case you had not already heard...
Cambridge University Library has announced plans to become a digital library for the world... The first collections to be digitised will be entitled The Foundations of Faith and The Foundations of Science. The goal for both is that they become ‘living libraries’ with the capacity to grow and evolve... The library also holds the world’s largest and most important collection of Jewish Genizah materials, including the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection – 193,000 fragments of manuscripts as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its Christian holdings include the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, one of the most important Greek New Testament manuscripts, the Book of Deer and the Book of Cerne. [ChristianToday]  
Very nice... [HT: TW at ETC]

Google acquires reCAPTCHA to help digitize books

This is good! Google just acquired reCaptcha and will be using it to help improve its book digitization project.

reCaptcha is:

a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science about it (or read more below).

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

Well now you should feel a bit better about the time you spend filling in those little boxes.

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

... The quality of Google's book search will be measured by how well it supports the familiar activity that we have come to think of as "googling," in tribute to the company's specialty: entering in a string of keywords in an effort to locate specific information, like the dates of the Franco-Prussian War. For those purposes, we don't really care about metadata—the whos, whats, wheres, and whens provided by a library catalog. It's enough just to find a chunk of a book that answers our needs and barrel into it sideways.

But we're sometimes interested in finding a book for reasons that have nothing to do with the information it contains, and for those purposes googling is not a very efficient way to search...

The article is worth reading. It highlights some of the pitfalls and errors, especially in terms of dating and categorizing resources, that Google Books is embedding in its metadata while digitizing books. I totally agree... but I also figure that a lot of that stuff would be totally unavailable to me without Google Books. Moral of the story: The thorough scholar will continue to need to be diligent.

Wordnik

Wordnik is an online resource which you (whether you are a native English speaker or not) might find useful. It is something of a multipurpose English dictionary. So far they claim to have a database of 1.7 million words, but it is an expandable database where users can add definitions, pronunciations, notes, tags, and related words. Wordnik draws upon a number of other online databases to compile each entry.
The example above is looking up "eschatology." (Click on the graphic to see the page for yourself in full size.)
What you will find are some example sentences where the word occurs. (Click on the Examples heading to get even more.) The examples I find came from quite a few different sources. They even include "real-time examples from Twitter."
The definitions are drawn from the American Heritage Dictionary, Century Dictionary, Webster's 1913 unabridged, and WordNet. Pronunciations come from the American Heritage Dictionary, but you can record your own. A statistics graph attempts to chart how often the word was used in a particular year (going back to 1800) and the "unusualness" of its use. Related words are suggested. (I created my own free account and added "apocalyptic" as a related word to "eschatology.") Images tagged with the word in Flickr are displayed. (Apparently a little Flickr humor that some rearends of cows and horses are included...) You also get etymologies from a couple dictionaries.
There are, of course, quite a few online English dictionaries, e.g., Wikipedia, Encarta [via Bing], Merriam-Webster, Answers.com [which draws from a number of other dictionaries and encyclopedias], Dictionary.com [which also draws on a number of sources], wordiQ, KartOO [which is rather unique in its presentation and definitely worth checking], and more. Add Wordnik to your bookmarks.
[HT: Downes]

World Digital Library Officially Launched

Another fascinating collection of old items to add to your bookmarked pages...
According to the official announcement:

UNESCO and 32 partner institutions today [2009.04.21] launched the World Digital Library, a Web site that features unique cultural materials from libraries and archives from around the world. The site includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs. It provides unrestricted public access, free of charge, to this material.

You'll want to look around a bit at the site, but I did find a number of interesting items. The full Codex Gigas is here. (Though I had previously noted its availability here also.) Here is the Book of Hours. I especially liked the collection of ancient maps of the middle East. Depicted below is a map of 1659 that is quite detailed and surprisingly accurate.

Other maps are more of a curiosity, such as this map of 1585 which is remarkably inaccurate. (Nazareth and Cana are located quite a bit north of the Sea of Galilee among other strange locations.)
[HT to Stephen's Web who notes that for $10 million you would think they would be able process a bit more than 1170 items.]

First Online Virtual Library of Medieval Works

Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts
As reported in SpaceMart:

Two years ago [UCLA Asst. Prof. Matthew] Fisher, former UCLA Professor Christopher Baswell, two graduate students and a computer developer decided to collect links to every manuscript from the eighth to the 15th century that had been fully digitized by any library, archive, institute or private owner anywhere in the world.
Last December the researchers officially opened the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts that links to nearly 1,000 manuscripts by 193 authors in 20 languages from 59 libraries around the world.

Note that in addition to a ms. search function, you can also browse by location of ms., shelfmark, author, title, or language. Anything medieval is usual way too modern for a NT guy like me, but it does include quite a number of biblical mss. Below is a screen capture of Codex Delta, a 9th century Greek/Latin ms. of the Gospels. Shown is the (longer) ending of the Gospel of Mark and below it are Eusebian references to sections in Luke which follows.

Cairo Geniza Digitization Project

I'm simply trying to catch up with Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica who had noted the start of Cairo Geniza Digitization Project back in 2006. This latest post was prompted by an article in the London Times. As the article states:

The fragments are known collectively as the Cairo Genizah (or Geniza) from the Hebrew for a document-store. Nearly a third of the materials are scattered around the world in universities and research institutes; the remaining two thirds are in Cambridge.

Now, documents in all locations are being scanned and catalogued and within five years should be available to the world via the web, thanks to an initiative launched in 1999 by the Friedberg Geniza Project, an international foundation. The main player in the project is the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit (widely called the Geniza Unit), set up in the mid-1970s to manage the Cambridge collection.

The importance to Jewish studies research of this online archive is expected to be revolutionary. The Geniza is “the greatest single hoard of primary sources for the study of Judaism and Jewish history ever uncovered,” says the University of Manchester professor Philip Alexander.

Like the Sinaiticus digitization project, this is going to be a great resource. For myself, I became interested in it as I was working on my dissertation on Psalm 22 (LXX 21) and the Crucifixion of Jesus, because a palimpsest fragment of Origen's Hexapla of this psalm was among the documents found. [Taylor, Charles: Hebrew-Greek Cairo Genizah palimpsests from the Taylor-Schechter collection including a fragment of the twenty-second Psalm according to Origen's Hexapla (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1900)]

If you want more information, here are some links to follow:

• Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library: Start here for background
• The Friedberg Geniza Project: Here is where everything will eventually end up online and information about the project is available
• Cairo Geniza links at Papyri Pages: Provides links to the various sites where the fragments are now being stored around the world
• Cairo Geniza at Wikipedia: Not a particularly long article, but it appears to be accurate enough and provides additional links
• One of Schechter and Taylor's more important publications, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, is available in full at Google books
• Some additional books to check at Internet Archive

Print your own public domain book

In an earlier post I noted the large list of books in the public domain related to biblical studies that have been digitized and posted for viewing or download on such sites as Google Books or Internet Archive. Bob Buller (SBL) alerted me to the fact that you can, and in fact are encouraged, to print any of these books via Lulu or other POD (print on demand) providers. I had some issues getting things to work on Lulu (they seem to prefer PDF text rather than PDF images), but PublicDomainReprints.org is especially designed to work with Google Books and Internet Archive. You can search directly from their front page or enter in the URL of a book you have found. I found that a paperback version of a 150 page book would be about USD $8 and books with 250+ pages would be in the USD $13-20 range (not counting any shipping/handling/tax). If you really want that hardcopy in your hand, this is not a bad way to go.
PublicDomainReprints also has a blog if you want to keep up on latest news. One interesting tidbit I saw there was that the Boston Public Library apparently is the first library to allow scan on demand. Check their list of scannable books, make your request, and it is delivered 5-7 days later in electronic form. The service is even free, but donations are suggested. (And then you can use PublicDomainReprints to get it printed, if you want.) Look for other libraries to start offering this service.

Tyndale Bulletin online & Google now searching magazines

Two journal / magazine items to note:
I just discovered that the Tyndale Bulletin has now posted online the full text of all its articles from volume 1 of 1956 up to 3 years ago. You can get article summaries from 1993 to the present. Check it out HERE. [HT: Bryan's]

Google now is searching magazines! I can't exactly find the list of all the magazines it is digitizing, but it must be an eclectic list. To just search in magazines, use the Advanced Book Search and choose that option. I was trying to think of a biblical term that might have shown up in magazines and tried "ossuary." HERE is what I came up with. Hmmm... not much there in that 1902 Popular Science or the 1994 New York Magazine, but I had hopes for the 1973 New York Magazine link. Snap! It was from an ad listing the sale of an "early Judaic ossuary." I missed my chance for fame and fortune, because just maybe it had some inscription on it... BUT, hey, I hit paydirt with the June 2007 issue of Atlanta. Okay, so maybe it's one more thing I don't have time to read...

Online Books in Biblical Studies: The Official List

Well, maybe not the "official" list, but this is as close as you are going to get. I've posted regularly on books that I or others have found in Google Books or Internet Archive that are worth downloading, but Bob Buller and Danny Zacharias have compiled the most complete list you are going to find. I received permission to be added as an editor, and I added a number of works they hadn't listed and provided something of an outline up front. (BTW, this was the first time I did any significant editing in Google Docs. Maybe it's because this is a big file, but I found it to be a real pain...) In any case, this is the page to bookmark:

Free Books in Biblical Studies and Related Fields
Google Books, Archive.org, & web-based content

More books to download, sites to bookmark

Continuing some previous posts on books to download (HERE and HERE and HERE), here are some more recommended books worth downloading:

• At Philonica and Neotestamentica, there is a good list of books related to Philo.
• Frederick Field, Notes on the Translation of the NT (1899)
• Thackeray's A Grammar of the Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint, Vol. 1, Introduction, Orthography and Accidence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1909)
• A Treatise on the Grammar of New Testament Greek by Georg Benedikt Winer, William Fiddian Moulton
  
• Nigel Turner, Grammatical Insights into the NT (2004) limited view
  

Some sites you may want to bookmark that either have texts or provide reviews include:

• The very useful Early Christian Writings (or try this link) and Early Jewish Writings sites (or try this link) do not look like they will be coming back. If you click on those title links, however, you can still access them from the Internet Archive. (HT: Mark Goodacre < Phil Harland)
• The Review of Biblical Literature site now has over 5000 books reviewed.
• The Denver Seminary has good listings for: Annotated OT Bibliography 2008 and New Testament Exegesis Bibliography 2008.
• I also find that I often check the Logos Product Guides on such topics as: Cultural and Historical Background of the Bible, Multi-Volume Commentaries, and Comments on Commentaries.
• Here is a helpful post by Phil Gons on commentaries which includes a pointer to the excellent BestCommentaries site.
• I've also pulled together some bibliography resources HERE, including these: Recommended OT Commentaries.pdf and Recommended NT Commentaries.pdf

NLT Study Bible

The previous post noted the availability of the ESV Study Bible in a variety of digital formats. It's only fair then (as a commenter noted to that post), to draw attention as well to the NLT Study Bible. Purchase of a hardcopy edition entitles the owner access to the full online version. As Keith Williams from Tyndale House noted:

Anyone can get free access to the complete contents of the NLTSB online for 30 days, and buyers of a print edition get lifetime online access. The initial digital offerings also include Libronix, WordSearch, and Laridian.

If you are going to be at ETS or SBL later this month, stop by the Tyndale booth to get a free code to download the Laridian version.

(I added the links.) Check it out.

Google Book Search Lawsuit Settled

Dan Cohen provides a helpful summary of the resolution of the Google Book Search lawsuit. Here's my summary of his summary and my reading of the Google statement:

• Google was sued by authors and publishers for copyright issues in their digitizing of books.
• Google now has permission to work with authors and publishers on making previews available of in-copyright books with possibilities for actual book sales or subscription service viewings.
• This is especially useful for in-copyright but out-of-print books.
• This agreement will also be a boon for research since rights are being granted to search all the digitized books. It appears that this is what SBL has done in allowing all its books to be searched. (Cf. this post from a few days ago.)

All in all, very good news for readers and researchers.

Search Full Text of All SBL Books

I had not noticed this before, and it looks to be a new feature on the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature) web site. It is now possible to search the full text of all SBL books. (If I have discerned correctly, there are over 1100 SBL books.) You do not need to be a SBL member to have access to this tool. Go to the SBL publications page and scroll down to the bottom where you will see this box.

Search the Full Text of all SBL Books

If you have used Google book search, the results will look familiar. I couldn't find any results that were more than limited preview, but this is still a great tool for doing research and finding references in a corpus that is specific to the field of biblical studies.