ROME: 20 July 2005 -- SELECT, a bilingual dictionary
and thesaurus of approximately 1,000 terms in use by Salesians, can now
be rapidly searched from its home page for all terms, and approximately
90% of these also contain a link to a text from the Salesian
magisterium, beginning from Don Bosco himself. In fact where a
term was used by Don Bosco, the link is to one of his texts in almost
every case.
As far as one can see, there is not a similar
resource in the entire range of 'salesiana', at least not one where you
can easily access some 245 original texts. The downside will be
for those who cannot read Italian, of course. The texts will be
of little value to such a person, but the explanation of the term,
which is easily accessible via the SELECT homepage, is in English and
should suffice for most purposes. For those who can read Italian,
the term may be easily identified in context using your browser's
'search/find' facility once the text has opened in front of you.
SELECT is now at version 3, and has jumped from
somewhere around 50 Mb to 150 Mb in size. Version 4, which is at
the planning stage and some months away still, will contain the same
range of texts but in English.
The entire 'web', for that is what it is, sits on
the www.sdb.org server and can be accessed via that route by going to
'resources' then to 'animation notes', but by far the easiest way to
access SELECT is to go via www.bosconet.aust com and
simply click on the SELECT icon at the top of the page.
Behind the the homepage, and accessible by clicking
on the Salesian logo or thereabouts, is a wealth of other information
on selected terms, or studies of important Salesian concepts.
SELECT has been trialled on a number of
browsers. IE offers no difficulties. Some
browsers (Firefox, Opera...) may or may not show up the separate links
to texts under each term entry. The author would be keen to hear from
anyone in that situation - and if you really wanted a copy for yourself
and were not prepared to download 150 Mb's worth (a big ask for any
bandwidth) you could request a personal copy on CD. It may be
possible in a future version to overcome the problem with certain
browsers once we have identified the root cause of the problem.
Meanwhile, the work goes on and SELECT is constantly
being modified, improved, added to. If you have additional terms
or additional useful information or corrections, please do not hesitate
to offer them.
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