[Runeberg] CCEL: Christian Classics Ethereal Library

-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Classic Nordic Literature online since 1992 - http://runeberg.org/ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:16:02 -0400 From: Harry Plantinga hplantin@calvin.edu To: 'CCEL List' Ccel-List@calvin.edu Subject: [ccel-list] state of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library The State of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library Considering that ccel-list denizens may have an interest in the inner goings-on and future plans of the CCEL, I thought I'd write a bit about the "state of the CCEL". The goal of the CCEL project is to glorify God and build up the church. To that end we select important books from Christian history and make them as widely available as possible. The CCEL continues to grow, both in content and in use, it has 719 titles in the database titles and 332 in our flavor of XML, Theological Markup Language (ThML). It receives about 300,000-500,000 hits per day from 23,000 different users. That's several million different users per year. Toward the end of making these books as widely available as possible, we have been working on converting books to ThML supporting conversion of ThML books to a variety of end-user formats. This past summer, the support at the CCEL for ThML matured a fair amount. They are automatically converted to HTML, pdf, text, palm docbook, and other formats. The PDF format in particular is quite nice for downloading and printing. Additional formats are relatively easy to add. I am using a considerable portion of my time these days on a new architecture for the CCEL that allows users to install books on the local computer. You can browse available books, install on your computer from the ccel.org server or from a CD-Rom, perform a full-text search of the books on your PC, etc. One use of this architecture will be to allow users to install select books from CDs, find updates for installed books from the web, etc. If you want to experiment with this architecture, see http://www.ccel.org/install/install.html. We're still trying to iron out the last couple of wrinkles. In addition to making installable CDs possible, there are other benefits to having a local CCEL installation on your own computer. One is that you can create or edit ThML documents on your computer and see how they will behave on the CCEL. Then, if you like, you can submit your ThML creation or corrections to the CCEL. This addresses in part one of the major needs of the CCEL project: an easier way for people to edit books. In order to try to raise funds to keep the project active, I'm working on three CD projects: a CD of audio narrations of the New Testament, a CD of the Schaff-Herzog encyclopedia, and a CD containing the "bibles and commentaries browser"-- a convenient way of accessing bible versions, commentaries, and other study resources by book, chapter, and verse. (See http://www.ccel.org/c/ccel/bcb/bcb.html.) Commentaries include those of Matthew Henry, Calvin, Barnes, Aquinas, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, and others. A part of the mission of the CCEL is selecting important books from Christian history. To that end, I hope to make more of a push on bibligraphy development -- getting input from users around the world on what the important books might be. There is an online bibliography development system that you can work on, if you are interested in this area -- see http://www.ccel.org/info/bibliography.html. Your work might consist of suggesting titles, voting on the importance of books, scanning public domain copies of wanted books, etc. You have to be given permission to edit the bibliography; if you are interested send me email (hplantin@calvin.edu). ------------------------------------------------------ What's New ------------------------------------------------------ Several books have been added in the recent past. Some of the more notable ones: Schaff Creeds of Christendom volumes one and two contain a wealth of information about creeds, confessions, catechisms, etc. (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds1.html and http://www.ccel.org/schaff/creeds2.html.) These volumes were an immense amount of work because of the languages in which these creeds appear -- Latin, Greek, German, French, Dutch, Italian, etc. The last volume -- volume 3, on protestant creeds -- has been scanned, and the first 15% of it has been typed. The remainder of the volume needs work--probably typing, from http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/creeds3/png. If interested contact steve@ccel.org. Someone who can type 16th century Latin, French, Italian, or Dutch would be most welcome. Guyon's Short and Easy Method of Prayer is very nice because it gives a straightforward explication of the road to contemplation. If you want a (relatively) simple explanation of stages of prayer, from meditative reading through union with God, it is a good place to start. See http://www.ccel.org/g/guyon/prayer.html. We also added a better user interface for bible dictionaries, and we now have two: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/smith_w/bibledict.toc.html and http://www.ccel.org/ccel/easton/ebd2.toc.html. We also added an interface for daily devotionals -- a URL that brings up today's devotion. See http://www.ccel.org/ccel/spurgeon/morneve.today.html. Other daily devotionals can easily be added in the same way. (By the way, I've always wanted to add Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest, but I've been unsure of the copyright status. Anyone know more?) ------------------------------------------------------ Helping ------------------------------------------------------ Long-time volunteer coordinator Liz Goodman (liz@ccel.org) is heading up the project to covert the Early Church Fathers volumes (ANF) to ThML and to another careful proofreading. If you are interested in participating in that project, contact her. There are always many more jobs on my to-do list than I am capable of doing, and things that should be done in days can take months or years. I know that many of you would be willing to help -- happy, in fact, for an opportunity to contribute to world Christianity in this way, if it were possible. Opportunities to do work that reaches millions of Christians around the world aren't that common. One way to help the project is of course to pray for it. Pray for me to follow the leading of the Spirit in directing this project. I have also written a web page of little jobs that need doing -- http://www.ccel.org/help/todo.html. It only has a few jobs on it now, but I hope to add them as they arise. If you see anything on this list that you would like to work on, please email steve@ccel.org and he'll assign the task to you. Blessings, Harry Plantinga Calvin College Director, Christian Classics Ethereal Library