Luther’s Sermons (Church Postils) on CD-ROM

Location: One of the computers in the southwest (back right) corner of the Information Commons area. Caution: using this area in the mid-to late afternoon is a bit hard on the eyes. Best time to come is at night.

Starting: Click the Luther’s Sermonsicon on the computer’s desktop. The most important buttons will be those on the left side.

Query: This is your search screen. The “Help” button does not work. You can do simple word searches or more complex and powerful searches such as:

(wom?n* or girl* or wife or wives or virgin* or handmaid* or maid*) and (duti* or duty or oblig* or must or should)

Watch how the search is laid out in the Records With Hits space.

Contents: Allows you to see what sections of the database are producing hits for the search you have just entered. Press the button a second time, and the view will toggle to a full-text view of the hit in its context.

Also note the Search menu on the top menu bar. Special search types peculiar to the database you are searching, if any, will appear at the bottom of this menu.

Cite the volume and pagination information at the top of the full-text portion of the page. Page numbers for individual paragraph are inserted in colored type throughout the full text.

Printing/Saving: There are two main ways to tell the computer what you want to print or save. One is to simply highlight (select) a section you want to print or save; the other is to “tag” the so-called “records.” When tagging, bear in mind that a “record” generally consists of a single paragraph, not a whole letter, sermon, etc. ! To tag a record, click the mouse somewhere within its text, go to the Edit menu, and click Tag Record.

To save a selected area, copy the text into WordPad (Start > Accessories > WordPad), and save the document thus created to your disk or USB drives.

To print a selected area, go to the File menu and choose Print.

To save tagged records, go to the File menu and choose Save As. Then be sure to select Keep Tags, or it will try to save the whole database to your disk (or Zip 750 disk or USB drive).

To print tagged records, go to the File menu and choose Print. Then click Print Range, and select Tag.

For more information about these databases, see the slim, ring-bound Intelex User’s Guide in the box of guides located near the computers.