What are Milestones and how do I use them?

This article introduces the concept of milestones in Verbum and teaches you how to use them to efficiently navigate your study in Verbum.

A Milestone marks a specific location or range within a Verbum resource. Use the Milestone search extension to quickly search your resources for all the relevant locations that discuss your passage, not just those that mention the passage.

A Books search (as shown below), searching for bible:"Jn 3:16" will find all references to John 3:16 in your library. This means that anytime a resource mentions John 3:16, it will be added to your results. 

 

Note, the syntax for Bible references changed in Verbum 10 as below:

 

You may easily be overwhelmed with more results than you have time to examine, and some of your results will prove irrelevant to your study. While it is sometimes helpful to see all the places where your passage is cited, there may be other times when you want to limit your search to show only those that contain the location of that verse - such as Bibles and Commentaries - and this is where Milestones can be really helpful.

Changing this Books Search into a Milestone Search limits the results to the actual text of John 3:16 in a Bible or where John 3:16 is the focal point of a commentary or resource. This means that you will limit your search to only those results that are about John 3:16 itself and not just a passing reference, “proof text,” or cross reference. So, if you can navigate to a location within a resource by typing “John 3:16” that same location will surface when running a milestone search.

 

Constructing a Milestone Search

To change the above search to a Milestone search, enter milestone: just before the reference. So in this case, the search string would become milestone:bible:"John 3:16" or milestone:"Jn 3:16"

 

Note, the syntax milestones also changed in Verbum 10 as below:

Run this search in Verbum.

Notice that the number of results using the Milestone search extension is much smaller - and the number of results will depend on resources you have in your Library. This is because your search has generated a list of resources that contain the text of the passage, such as Bibles, or are discussing your passage, such as commentaries and journal articles.

 

Refining a Search Even Further

Note:Additional search terms can be combined with the Milestone Search to further refine results, for example:

• [search term] INTERSECTS milestone:"reference"
• perish INTERSECTS milestone:"John 3:16"

This will return results where the word perish appears in either the verse itself or where articles discussing that verse use that specific word.

 

Note, the search syntax also changed in Verbum 10 as below: