austraLasia #1700
Memoirs of the Oratory - text available in
full web version
ROME: 28th November 2006 -- Mindful of the reccomendation of the Rector
Major, as he moves around provinces, that confreres, and Rectors in particular,
should make an effort to read the Memoirs of the Oratory at least once a
year, a version of this primary source is now available in English on Bosconet (under the What's new
section on the home page for the moment).
Should you be asking, in fact, 'What's new about that?', a
word of explanation is in order.
Firstly, we are talking of the 1989 Don Bosco Publications,
New Rochelle edition, which has been out of print for some time now.
Effectively that has been the only English version, and a most valuable one
too, for its translation, notes and bibliography. A new updated edition
of this, corrected in terms of translation where necessary, is in the pipeline.
The point is this, however. People have been
clamouring for copies of the English version, and as a result a number of
'online versions' have cropped up, one of which is already available from the
Philippines but hosted from Cambodia - a link to that is available on the Bosconet homepage too. The
difficulty of these versions is that they come from low-end scanned versions
which introduce errors into the text on the one hand, and are simply 'the book'
webified on the other.
Another approach is needed to meet the nature of the medium,
which has no 'pages' in reality, even though we call it a web page. How, for
example, does one represent a footnote when there is no page? It has to
be an end-note, obviously. And then what happens? Will someone be prepared to
sit down and laboriously move 895 or thereabout footnotes to the end, and link
them to the correct spot in the text? Hardly.
Fortunately, there is software (free, and open source,
incidentally) which permits the conversion of a high-end scanned or original
digital text into a storage format called XML. From there it can be rendered
for the web according to principles of the web. It can just as easily be
rendered from the same XML format for printing to paper, and so on. The end
result is a text stored accurately for posterity and capable of rendering in a
variety of media.
It is this latter XML process that has been applied to MO -
and the result is a version for the web which allows one to navigate it in a
variety of ways, including moving back and forwards between text and end-note,
or moving between one footnote reference and another when an internal reference
is made. This latter was necessary because footnotes applied to a chapter,
whereas the endnotes are at the end of the entire text, so run cumulatively
almost as far as 900! Without cross-referenced notes the reader would now be
lost on the web if note 3 in one chapter sends the reader to note 6 in another,
which is no longer note 6 but 106 or whatever! Cross-referencing has
overcome this problem.
The only material the web version does not include (though
it would be possible to provide a link to these if people felt they needed
them) is the illustrations in the book. It makes little sense to try to
place images in a web version as if it were a book. It is much easier to
make these available separately if they are needed.
Enjoy! In due course, this material (there is now a
developing set of XML-based resources on Bosconet) will move to a page of its
own. For now, consult it from the home page.
___________________
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