The Digital Bible Library 4.6 was released on April 27, 2016. It provides a renewed and extended “Access Request” dialog for LCHs, a new feature for releasing content from DBL using “Shareable Links”, improvements to the content of notification emails, support for ParaTExt 8 (released later in 2016), and a variety of other small improvements and bug fixes.
New Features
- Shareable links. A DBL “shareable link” is a private and temporary Internet address which can be created by an IPC. The link will cause DBL to return to the person who accesses it the specific content selected by the IPC Licenser who created the link. The creator and recipient of the link share a common passcode, which restricts access to the content to only individuals who know the passcode. Shareable links remain available for access for a maximum of 72 hours (3 days) from the time that they were created and expire 24 hours after they are first accessed. Records are added to organization history when shareable links are created or are used. (docs)
- DBL readied for providing licensing services for delivery of resource texts to ParaTExt 8 users (these features will be enabled at release of ParaTExt 8)
Improvements & Bug Fixes
- Licensing – Significant improvements to the dialog used by LCHs for making access requests. (docs)
- DBL will present relevant information, recommendations, and options to the LCH user who is making an access request depending on whether the LCH has a previous licensing relationship (within DBL) to the IPC, or has a common licensing document enabled.
- There is a new option for including a brief amount of free-form message text together with the request. Messages will be included with the email notification to the IPC, and are also available for viewing from the IPC’s Requests review interface.
- Ability for the LCH to select which license they wish to work with (if multiple options are available in common with the IPC)
- Licensing – Ability for LCH or IPC to withdraw requests or grants which have not been processed. Sometimes this is needed when multiple requests or grants have been made for the same content but not all have been finalized.
- Licensing – Add control for IPCs to disallow unsolicited access requests (i.e. requests from LCHs prior to a common license being established between the organizations)
- Licensing – Option to hide “stale” requests (older than 60 days).
- Notifications (Licensing) – Licensing notification emails now provide links which return the user directly to DBL, and to the next step in the licensing workflow for the current entry (previously took use to relevant Help)
- API – Added ‘content options’ (include footnote, cross-references, introductions, study notes) to /api/license_agreements
- Metadata – Include new format for language information in text bundle downloads – ldml.xml
- Various other bug fixes and minor improvements.
Scripture text content summary at the time of this release:
- 1264 entries
- 992 unique languages
- 416 complete Bibles
- 795 New Testaments
- 53 Portions
- 133 contributing entities