Organising sermon preparationPosts in this series
Now that your hard copy commentaries are in order, you need to sort out your soft copy commentaries.
Finding soft copy commentaries
Firstly, I should give some advice on how you can get soft copy (electronic) commentaries.
Of course, you can purchase soft copy commentaries from organisations like Logos.
But many older, yet reliable, commentaries are out of copyright and available for free on the internet. One of the best storehouses is the Internet Archive. Just punch into their search box the name of the author and book of the Bible you're after and many of the commentaries should show up as free downloads.
Another way to find copyright free commentaries is to get access to a hard copy of the commentary you want, and then type a quote from it into Google and see what comes up.
Reading soft copy commentaries
If you're like me, you can sometimes have over 30 soft copy commentaries to read in one go.
This can sound daunting. But I've found that if you streamline the process of reading them as much as possible, you can save significant time and get through many of them very quickly.
Firstly, I make sure that I store all my commentaries in PDF format. Often you will download commentaries as PDFs. But if they're not in PDF format, I'll convert them to PDF format using a program like PDF creator as a printer.
Once all my soft copy commentaries are PDFs, I keep them in separate folders on my computer: Whole Bible commentaries, Old Testament commentaries, New Testament Commentaries, and commentaries on individual Biblical books.
Next I make a 'Current' reading folder and dump into it copies of PDFs from those folders that are relevant to the book I'm working on. So for example I'm currently preaching on Hebrews and so in my 'Current' reading folder I have included Westcott's commentary on Hebrews, John Gill's commentary on the whole Bible and Henry Alford's commentary on the New Testament .
Now once you have all your commentaries in one location, I open all the files in my current folder at once using my favourite PDF viewer, Foxit Reader. Foxit opens the commentaries not as separate windows, but as individual tabs within the one window, which keeps everything nice and tidy.
Then I physically rotate my 20 inch monitor so that it is in portrait mode rather than landscape. This means one entire page of each commentary takes up pretty much the full screen and can be easily read. (I purposely bought an LCD monitor that would allow me to do this as I would not advise reading a large number of PDFs if you cannot view a full page easily on your screen - the less scrolling the better.)
Then once I'm ready to read, I quickly move through the commentaries on my screen, closing them automatically with the keyboard shortcut: Control + F4.
Preparations for future reading
I have enabled a setting in Foxit reader that it remembers where I was last up to in a document. This is of vital importance. Some commentaries are huge! For example, my Albert Barnes commentary on the New Testament is 5,850 pages. So hunting around in it for the book of Hebrews every week is a big waste of time. Whereas with this setting in Foxit, I only have to find Hebrews once and then Foxit automatically remembers where I was up to last time. To enable the setting, go to Preferences and then the History section. (The only limitation to this is that Foxit only remembers the last 200 documents. So if you take a significant break from preaching on a book of the Bible, Foxit will put you back at page one when you next open the commentary. To get around this, I add bookmarks using Foxit to my PDFs by going to the Edit menu and then Add Bookmark).
If you move to another book of the Bible and want to come back to preaching on the book you were preaching on in the future, I'd also advise copying your 'Current' folder back into the book of the Bible's folder as a subfolder. Then when you come back to it, you don't need to go hunting around in the Whole Bible Commentary folder etc for your book and copying PDFs again into the Current folder.
Conclusion
Now that may sound long-winded, but it is a system that works for me and keeps me reading a large number of commentaries fairly easily.
But if you have any tips on reading soft copy commentaries, please let me know in the comments.
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