Nearly two years after the initial prepublication announcement, the complete International Critical Commentary Series (ICC) is finished... The commentary series that took more than 100 years to write (and counting) has been digitized in just over 2.
As you can see, this is one big set of books. Fifty-three bound volumes to be exact. When we posted the prepub page on December 12, 2003, we had no idea how many people would pony up $1,000 for the set. But we knew the value of the series for biblical study and knew that of any electronic publisher we were in the best position to get it done.
The books were shipped off to the data keying center and came back needing lots of correction. In particular, the ancient language text (like Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic and Greek) required a team of developers to go through it word by word, correcting the files as they went. This turned out to be such a headache that we devised a new tool (dubbed Shibboleth and mentioned briefly by Bob on his own blog) to speed up the process.
The specifics about the ways Shibboleth speeds up and improves the process is fodder for another post, probably by someone who knows more about it than I do. But I can say that "there was much rejoicing" in the text development department the day the final volume was completed, ship-checked and ready to head off to replication.
And now, just over two years after announcing the start of this massive project, it is being delivered to users so that these important volumes can be utilized by seminary professors and students, preachers, teachers and other folks studying the Bible.
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