Getting the Most Out of Anchor Yale Bible

If you purchased the Anchor Yale Bible, by now you’ve probably had a chance to install it and explore a bit. Those of you who are relatively new to Logos may be wondering how to get the most out of your new commentaries. In this post, we’ll share some tips that will help you put your investment to good use.

Setup Tips

1. Copy the resources to your hard drive.

It may go without saying, but be sure to copy all of your resource files to your hard drive rather than running them off the CD. With your CD in your drive, go to Tools > Library Management > Location Manager and follow the instructions. Everything will be much faster with the files on your hard drive. AYB will take up 308 MB of disk space.

2. Create a collection.

While it’s not essential to using your new commentaries, creating a collection can provide some additional benefits that you might find useful (e.g., faster, more target searching and more exhaustive results in the Passage Guide). In my opinion, this is a good thing to do for many new products you purchase.

You can either create your own collection by going to Tools > Define Collections > New (see also this video demonstration) or download the one I already created and put it in C:Documents and Settings{UserName}My DocumentsLibronix DLSCollections on a Windows machine or in Users/{UserProfile}/Library/Application Support/Libronix DLS/Collections on a Mac.

3. Make sure your resource association is installed.

A resource association allows your entire series to function in some ways as a single book. That means that if you’re in the AYB commentary on Romans and want to jump to the commentary on Isaiah to look up a related passage, just type in the reference in the Reference Box at the top left-hand portion of the resource window.

If that doesn’t work, it’s probably because you don’t have the Resource Association installed. On Windows, run Libronix Update to get it (i.e., Tools > Libronix Update). Alternatively, you could create your own resource association. (This feature is currently only in the Windows version.)

Usage Tips

1. Explore AYB in “My Library.”

To see all of your Anchor Yale Bible commentaries in My Library, simply type in the series abbreviation, AYB, and all of your other titles will be filtered out. Alternatively, if you created a collection, you can simply select your collection from the Collection dropdown.

2. Use AYB in the Passage Guide.

Since the files for the Anchor Yale Bible are commentaries, they will instantly just work when you run a Passage Guide on any portion of Scripture covered by the series. If you don’t see the Anchor Yale volume(s) show up in the initial list of 15 that appears, be sure to click “More »” to see the rest of your commentaries that cover your passage. One of the cool features of the Passage Guide in is that it will remember your top five favorites on each book of the Bible. So the next time you study a passage in the same book, the commentaries that you’ve used most will appear at the top.

To get even more out of AYB in the Passage Guide, click on Properties, scroll down to the Collections section, and check the box next to your AYB collection.

This will tell the Passage Guide to search all of the other commentaries in the AYB for any mention of your passage, providing you with even more to dig into.

3. Find even more with advanced searching.

If you created a collection, you can also do some powerful searching by using the Basic Search (Search > Basic Search) or the Reference Browser (Go > Reference Browser). Just be sure to limit your searches to your new collection, and in just a second or two you’ll be able to find all of the occurrences of words, phrases, Bible references, and more in your entire AYB collection.