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The Essential IVP Reference CollectionA Desert Island disk!THE ESSENTIAL IVP REFERENCE COLLECTION There are two kinds of people who, on reading the lines above, might be tempted to skip this review. The first are the technophobes whose eyelids close at the term CD-ROM and the second are those for whom £99.99 is just too much. To the first I would say that the software package reviewed here is not just a product, it is something of a milestone in publishing. To the second, I would say that this is worth every penny. To be honest in the decade or so of Christian CD-ROMs there have been few that have been memorable. What IVP have bravely (recklessly?) done with the Essential IVP Reference Collection is something very different; they have put 13 of their top reference volumes on one single disk. These are: Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (DJG), Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (DPL), Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments (DLNTD), Dictionary of New Testament Background (DNTB), The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, The New Bible Dictionary, The New Bible Commentary, Hard Sayings of the Bible, The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (DBI), New Bible Atlas, The New Dictionary of Biblical Theology and the New Dictionary of Theology. On their calculation this comes to over 12,000 pages of printed material and over ten million words and on my calculation around £400 worth of books. There is, however, not just a vast quantity of words here. Most of these titles are well known volumes and I suspect most EN readers will have at least one of them on their shelves. The four New Testament 'Dictionary ofƒ.' titles are of enormous value, the recent Dictionary of New Testa-ment Background particularly so, because it has so much information that is otherwise unavailable. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery has been very well reviewed in EN and elsewhere. And so on. Many of these titles have only recently been published. The New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, for example, has just been awarded 'Reference Book of the Year' at the 2001 Christian Booksellers' Convention. (How long will it be before the question 'digital or paper?' will greet our request for a new title in our Christian bookshops?) The titles on the disk have been well chosen. Not every book lends itself to being transferred into digital format; books such as novels or histories that have a linear structure where you start at the beginning and read through to the end do not transfer well. Sensibly though, almost all the texts here are the non-linear sort; even in their original paper form they are books to dip into. In fact, some texts are so full of cross-references and biblical citations that the digital format makes them far easier to consult. The transfers to digital format have been well done and IVP have sensibly used the existing Logos library system. As a result, if you have any other Logos software such as a Bible it can be integrated in. This is quite useful as the only Bible version included is the AV, although other translations can be unlocked at a price. All titles can be installed over to a hard disk so that you don't need to carry the CD-ROM around with you; handy if you have a notebook PC. Hardware requirements are minimal (the box claims Windows 3.1 and above, a Pentium, 16 M RAM and a 2 speed or higher CD-ROM, although I think that is optimistic). Mac owners will be sad to know that no version exists for them. The Logos library software takes a bit of time to get to grips with, but repays efforts handsomely. It is hard to overestimate the utility and significance of this work. Even if - like me - you already have many of the volumes, this library on a disk is still worth having. It opens up a completely new way of working with books; to be able to search for phrases and to call up biblical references in fractions of a second is amazing. I feel I ought to find something to quibble at in this work but am frustrated. Criticism is disarmed by the marvel of the thing; after all, few of us could easily lift the paper equivalents of this single disk. One issue, probably inevitable in such a work, does need flagging: it is hard to get 'a feel' for a digital text. For instance, pick up a book and within a minute's browsing you get a sense of the style, intent and level of the work. It is far harder to do this with a digital title. For example, I find it difficult to get any feel for the two Bible Background Commentaries, probably because I have never seen the book versions. Given that the texts here range from the level of the casual Bible reader to the serious academic this could be a problem. I realise that to many EN readers the word 'bargain' is not normally associated with something that gives you just a penny change out of £100, but, unless you need to buy a computer to run it, the Essential IVP Reference Collection CD-ROM is just that. Congratulations to all concerned. Chris Walley, Swansea© Evangelicals Now - July 2001 |