ROME: 23rd May 2005 -- The eve of the Feast of Mary Help of Christians seems a good time to announce the availability of SELECT v. 1.0. The title is an acronym for Salesian etymology, lect and terminology, but what you have is a fully hyperlinked web with access not just to a thousand 'Salesian' terms, but one or two paragraphs of history on each.  An ongoing formation tool. You can find SELECT on www.sdb.org by going to Resources/animation notes. 

    SELECT gives you access to the corpus from which the terms are drawn, and a number of detailed case studies.  You have here a Salesian thesaurus which has not been available in a single package, in English, before.  Indeed, not in Italian either.     

    There is even better news, something quite mind-blowing at first consideration. 

    The technology exists to enable you to directly add to or alter what you find in SELECT and while  sdb.org does not currently employ this technology, another site does. 

    If you would like an entirely new collaborative experience of using the web, simply let me know and I will immediately give you access.  This is a collaborative tool which can change the way we work.  I have absolutely no doubt that you will see the enormous potential in front of you.

    Have no fear that you might put paid to the two years of solid work that have brought SELECT to where it is.  You might! But the technology records a history of changes and enables me to restore whatever you might have deleted in error.  I prefer to think not of possible error but of the certain richness to be gained from your insights and drawn from your experience. 

    Just do it, as the saying goes!  JBF

 

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