Before you call your missionaries,
check to see what time it is in their
part of the world, so that you do not call them in the middle of
the night.
Check out their weather
conditions
When
traveling: remember International SOS
United States Center for World Mission
Evangelical Missiological Society
Missiology Homepage
Missiological Dictionary
Initiative
360
Questions
to ask a mission agency
American Missionary
Fellowship
Education and missions may change dramatically as
the astonishing power of the Internet is used to reduce costs, to
increase productivity, and to make resources available to everyone online
for free. Two examples are presented here to illustrate what it will be like
in the future.
1992 Book Online
Dr. James J. O'Donnell writes:
"I am pleased to announce release of the Internet
edition of a substantial work of scholarship, coinciding with availability
of a paper reprint edition. These steps demonstrate that it is no
longer necessary for scholarly works to be "out of print" and
unavailable, and also show that high-quality scholarship of the sort until
now available only in expensive, limited press-run editions, can be made
widely and freely available to students and scholars.
In 1992, I published with Oxford's Clarendon Press imprint the three
volumes (approx. 1200 pages) of Augustine: Confessions
(introduction, text, and commentary by James J. O'Donnell: ISBN
0-19-814378-8). The work sold for c. $300 and eventually went out of
print after selling approximately 1200 copies.
The entire work is now available on the Internet free of charge to users: http://www.stoa.org/hippo.
No special equipment or software is required and the work can be read with
all commonly used browsers. A duplicate copy is available at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/conf.
The work provides a complete Latin text of the Confessions, a detailed
scholarly commentary on the text line-by-line, and a lengthy interpretive
introduction (http://www.stoa.org/hippo/comm.html)
--the most accessible part of the book to the Latinless reader.
At approximately the same time, a reprint edition of the hardcover
original is being published by Sandpiper Books, in association with Oxford
University Press. The American distributor is Powells Bookstore,
1501 E. 57th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637 (tel:
773-666-5880; fax:773-955-2967; e-mail: PowellsChicago@msn.com),
with books due for delivery in early February 2000 (price TBD, but
substantially lower than the original hardcover). British
distribution is done through Postscript, 24 Langroyd Road, London SW17 7PL
(0208-767-7421).
The WWW edition has been prepared in cooperation with the Stoa Consortium
(www.stoa.org), under the leadership of
Ross Scaife of the University of Kentucky with SGML encoding and HTML
conversion by Anne Mahoney of Boston University. I am deeply
grateful to these colleagues for their interest in the project and the
quality of the result. The Stoa project seeks to make available and
preserve for the future high-quality peer-reviewed scholarly work
available on the Internet. Financial support for the conversion of
this work was provided by the University of Pennsylvania, for which I am
very grateful as well.
E-versions and p-versions of the "same book" are not identical
and I expect there will continue to be users of both versions of this
text--indeed many individuals will find both useful. The two
versions are close enough, however, that it makes sense to represent them
under the same library cataloging record. I am happy to report that
they can be seen this way in the Online Public Access Catalogs of two
great universities with which I have had the honor of association, Penn
(...) and Yale (http://www.library.yale.edu/orbis/).
(My thanks to my colleagues Patricia Renfro of Penn and Ann Okerson of
Yale for facilitating this demonstration.)"
---January 16, 2000
Congratulations to Dr. Donnell and
hopefully many more works will be made available.
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