I thrilled, many years ago, when Logos Software first brought out its Early Church Fathers package. It was a searchable database of the old Edinburgh ANF and NPNF series, and the search engine is outstanding. I was somewhat disappointed, however, when I found the Fathers’ texts to be so poorly proofread that the search engine missed many important passages. I raised this concern when I received notice earlier this week that Logos has compiled the Patrologia Graeca and is considering doing the same for the Patrologia Latina.

I’m glad I asked the question, because the answer is very reassuring: The files for the Logos version of ANF/NPNF were done on a shoestring, financed by an organization called the “Electronic Bible Society” at least 12 years ago. They were scanned, OCR’d and had very little clean-up done to them because the organization couldn’t afford it.

Today Logos’s text-encoding processes are much different. They use digitization firms that guarantee accuracy rates (typically 99.95%). With stuff like Greek, they usually do this by double-keying — typing the text in twice. Sometimes they triple-key. Then these copies are compared to each other and the differences reconciled. After this, a separate quality-assurance team actually puts errors into the text (logs them of course) and then another team corrects the files against the print. The percentage of known (on-purpose) errors found and corrected gives an indicator to the quality of the text. So the texts should be much better in the realm of accuracy than the long-ago ECF files.