Lexel Software and the Biblical Studies Foundation Team Up

Lexel Software (www.lexelsoftware.com) and the Biblical Studies Foundation (www.bible.org -- the NET Bible guys) are teaming up to bring more content to the web. I am the president of Lexel Software and have known several individuals who work for BSF for several years now. We are joining together to help the community product content that the community can use more freely.

Our first joint project is a syntactical markup of the Greek New Testament text, called the NET GEMS project ("NET Greek-English Morphology and Syntax" is what that stands for). This is an effort in which we want to involve the community. And there are a number of other efforts that we plan to participate in later down the road in which we want the same. To that end we've published some documents about what we're doing.

I know that some of you in the blogosphere very much want to see more content freely available on the web. I've read posts in some of your blogs that say as much. Well, so do we. As such I want to request that all interested please read our publications and offer your critiques, whether positive or negative. If you want you can direct them to me through email (if that is most appropriate), though blog-speak would often be sufficient and would allow others to see what you're thinking as well as I. I am convinced that we can do more with community involvement and with technology than we are doing now, and Lexel Software and the Biblical Studies Foundation are committed to making sure that happens.

Here is what we have posted so far. All of this is only on the Lexel Software website at the moment, though at some point I believe that they'll be adding some of this to the bible.org website.

An essay entitled "Doing Online Collaborative Biblical Studies," which is a collection of thoughts I have had on my own or in conversations with others on some general principles that we could follow.

An overview of the NET GEMS project, which will tell you a little more about the project.

And the guidelines and procedures we intend to follow with the NET GEMS project. It is in many ways a fleshing out of the first essay for this particular project.

I really would like to hear all of your thoughts on such matters. We'll be giving a demo at SBL which will eventually go up online, so if you're there please stop by and ask for me (note: I won't be there at ETS, just SBL, though someone else can show you around the demo). Hope to hear from many of you soon. And if you have something to say on a blog, just in case I haven't discovered yours yet, please send me an email. Thanks!