Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Free SBL books

The following url has links for free, downloadable books published by SBL under the International Cooperation Initiative, an SBL group interested in promoting (otherwise expensive) scholarship to developing countries. Scroll toward the bottom of the page where you will see links under general categories, e.g., Archaeology and Biblical Studies. Most of these are monographs, e.g., very specialized, but there are some more general works as well.

http://sbl-site.org/publications/onlinebooks.aspx

Free books for ANE studies

The following url has links to many free, downloadable books. Most are pretty old, but there are some diamonds, e.g., the old ICC series:

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d9xh4s8_21x7n3f

Free two-keystroke lexicon

Again, from Tyndale House, you can download a free lexicon program that looks up Akkadian, Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew/Aramaic, Latin, and Syriac words:

http://www.2letterlookup.com/

Free reference management/bibliographical software

Archiving sources, consistency in citation styles, and ensuring that cited sources (and only cited sources) wind up in your bibliography are just three of the reasons you should use reference management software.

See the following urls for free bibliographical software:

Aigaion:
http://www.aigaion.nl/

BibDesk
http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/

I, Librarian
http://bioinformatics.org/librarian

RefBase
http://www.refbase.net/

Zotero
http://www.zotero.org/

See the helpful comparison chart of these programs and more at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software

The following is supposedly good for Biblical Studies (from SBL website):
http://www.sgj.org.uk/CiteSBLHS/

Free Bible software

The following links will take you to various free Bible software for pcs and Macs. For a brief review of each, see the resources page at the Tyndale House website.

Online Bible:
http://www.onlinebijbel.org/html/eng/index.htm

E-Sword
http://www.e-sword.net/

The Sword
http://www.crosswire.org/index.jsp

Bible Database
http://bibledatabase.org/full.html

Free Unicode Hebrew and Greek fonts

There are many advantages of using Unicode Hebrew and Greek fonts in your writing as opposed to non-Unicode is (see, e.g., http://www.i18nguy.com/UnicodeBenefits.html), but certainly one is that Unicode fonts render your Hebrew and Greek readable to anyone using any Unicode font.

There are at least two sources for obtaining free Unicode Hebrew and Greek fonts, the first being SBL:

http://sbl-site.org/educational/biblicalfonts.aspx

For the Hebrew, use the SIL package (more intuitive keyboard map) rather than the Tiro.

The second is Tyndale House:

http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/index.php?page=fonts

This site also has downloadable Cardo Unicode Greek and Hebrew Bibles, which is efficient if you need to copy/paste substantial portions of Scripture.

Both sites have instructions on how to download and install the fonts.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

LEO - online German/English English/German dictionary

For help with German terms, see:

http://dict.leo.org/

If it doesn't return a definition, you can query the online community.

British Library EThOS dissertation search engine

Another search engine for doctoral dissertations:

EThoS: http://ethos.bl.uk/Home.do

Searches dissertations from many UK universities (but Oxford and Cambridge are not participating schools, so not all theses from them). Some are downloadable, some are for purchase. I don't think it supplies abstracts. You don't need to register to use it, except for downloading or purchasing.

PhDData.org

For US PhD dissertations, see:

http://www.phddata.org/index.php

Abstracts are free, downloads are for a fee.