Thank you for taking the time to consider this questionnaire, which is intended to capture your preferences for a new, digitally-reproduced Newberry Study Bible.
If you're an owner of a Newberry Bible (new or old), you will be familiar with Thomas Newberry's system of symbols, marginal notes and footnotes. These "helps" are designed to provide readers having little or no knowledge of the original Hebrew and Greek languages with a grasp of the intrinsic precision and expressiveness of the original Biblical texts - much of which is lost during English translation. With these helps, the Newberry Study Bible intends to make Scripture self-explanatory, which permits Christians to draw immeasurable profit from allowing Scripture to interpret itself.
Unfortunately, Newberry Bibles cannot be reproduced from the original plates. Rather, they can only be reproduced by printing a scanned image of a printed copy. For this reason, you may experience some difficulty reading the small typeface and, on occasions, distorted (or pixellated) symbols and glyphs. You may also struggle to distinguish one symbol from another.
Motivated by a desire to reproduce the Newberry Study Bible in a digital form that will serve the broadest possible needs of current and future generations, a digitisation project is currently underway. When complete, this project will provide a reliable foundation for producing an improved Newberry Study Bible as (i) a sharp printed edition and (ii) a hyperlinked and fully-searchable digital resource.
To the end that the digitisation project delivers a new Bible that meets the needs of current and future generations, the objective of this questionnaire is to capture your preferences relating to layout, formatting, font size, study helps and supplementary material. It will also be used to measure what options should be considered in relation to printing, binding and digital formatting.
Please note that this is not an order form to purchase a new Bible.
There are eight sections to this questionnaire, which will take less than 15 minutes to complete:
Section 1 - This introduction
Section 2 - Fundamentals
Section 3 - Layout of the text
Section 4 - Margin notes and footnotes
Section 5 - Formatting and typesetting
Section 6 - Supplementary material
Section 7 - Printing options
Section 8 - Digital options
May the Lord use this project to kindle a fresh appetite for the study of the Bible, God's Word, and through it, strengthen the spiritual lives of God's people for His glory.
Roger Fraser
Melbourne, Australia
newberrystudybible@gmail.com
Psalm 119:160 Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of Thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.
