Carmelite Digital Library Blog

We are starting to receive questions about various features of the Carmelite Digital Library (CDL).  The questions are taking on the form “What is X?” while others are “How do I do Y?”.   Most of these topics are covered in the Help files that ship with the product.  But as the Help files were written to explain or document every feature and option, the material is sometimes very dense.  To help our users we plan to answer the questions we receive using this blog.  We hope that by providing smaller and more targeted information everyone can benefit from the answers to the questions.

So here is the first question: What are those I, P, and S icons that I see on the right side at the top and bottom of a document?

Answer:

First we need to explain what each letter represents:

• “I” is shorthand for “ICS”, the publisher of the Kavanaugh/Rodriguez translation included in the CDL.
• “P” s is for Peers (E. Allison Peers) who translated the other English version included in the CDL.
• “S” is easy: it is shorthand for Spanish.

Each of the images or icons is a hyperlink that when clicked takes you to the matching document in one of the other versions.  For example, if you are reading St. Teresa’s Letter 53 to Padre Juan Ordóñez, clicking on the “P” icon will open the Peers translation of the same letter and clicking on the “S” goes to the Spanish version.

In a perfect world finding the matching document in another version would be easy: Letter 53 in the ICS version would be Letter 53 in the Peers translation.  But that is not the case.  Prof. Peers did not have all the resources available to him that Fr. Kavanaugh had some fifty years later. So in Peers the matching letter is really Letter 46 (Serial 55).   Our editing staff has done the research so you don’t have to go find the matching material.  All you need to do is click a link.

Any one document will have at most two icons.  There will be two icons if the document has a matching version in both of the other versions.  But this is not always the case.  For example, Letter 50, also to Padre Juan Ordóñez, does not exist in the Peers translation.  So if you are reading the Spanish version of that letter the only icon will be “I” which links to the ICS translation of that letter.   There is also other material that is unique to a particular edition.  An example of such material are the Biographical Sketches that follow the Letters.  This material is unique to the ICS version.