Open Source Commentary Survey – October Update

There are currently six volunteers working on the Open Source Commentary Survey – a big “thank you” to those who have agreed to take part so far. See here to see which books still need to be surveyed. Tyndale House library have very kindly supplied me with a copy of their commentary catalogue in XML format. This will enable me to work out which commentaries are in the the Public Domain with a fair degree of accuracy. In return I will be supplying them with a copy of my list.

A number of people have suggested that I download commentaries already digitised on-line and use them. I did some work this week to see if this would be possible. Below is a screenshot of C.F. Burney’s commentary on Judges.

To me this well below the standard that I would want to use. The page colour is uneven and makes the text difficult to read. I experimented extracting the images, which removes the shadows and the colour-cast, but the resulting text is very pale and, again, difficult to read.

Fortunately I have access to commentaries through Book Aid locally and can order what they don’t have elsewhere, provided that the cost is reasonable. I will consider crowd-funding this if the cost becomes too great.