Do you know all the ways to mark content in the Gospel Library mobile app?

Long-pressing text in a chapter will select the text and bring up the annotation menu. The first button on the annotation menu is Mark, which allows you to highlight or underline the selected text.

After tapping Mark, you can choose a different color or style by pressing Style in the annotation menu. When you’re done, tap away from the annotation menu and the mark to close it.

To change or delete a mark you’ve already created, tap lightly on the mark, and the annotation menu will appear again. The Remove button will delete the mark (and any notes, tags, notebooks, or links attached to it).

There are several other buttons in the annotation menu:

Note will open the note editor so you can add a note to the selected content.

Tag brings up the tag panel. You can use tags to label content related to topics that are important to you. You can browse tagged content in the Notes section of the app (more information below).

Add to opens the add to notebook panel. You can use notebooks to store notes, gather resources related to what you’re currently studying, or prepare a lesson or talk. You can see and manage notebooks in the Notes section of the app.

Link opens the link panel. A link is a personal cross-reference or scripture chain that you can use to connect content throughout the library.

Copy copies the selected text to the clipboard so it can be pasted in a note or in a different app.

Share allows you to share the selected text using options provided by iOS or any third-party apps you have installed.

Search brings up the search panel and automatically initiates the search for the selected word or phrase.

Define allows you to look up the definition of a selected word using the lookup options provided by iOS. You can change the default lookup options in iOS settings.

You may want to take a few minutes to read through the Gospel Library User Guide. You may discover many features that you didn’t know about.

• Gospel Library User Guide (iOS)
• Gospel Library User Guide (Android)

Volunteers are needed to help tag more than a million images in the LDS Media Library on LDS.org with information that makes them easier to find.

For years, the Church has collected images submitted by member photographers. Now that there are more than a million images in the database, volunteers of all ages are needed to add a title, description, and search words to each image.

You can volunteer from your home right now. All you need is a computer or tablet and 5 minutes or more. Your help in tagging photos will make it easier for everyone to find and download images for use in lessons, family home evenings, blogs, websites, and other noncommercial, gospel-sharing efforts.

Photo tagging in five easy steps

1. Go to AssetEnrichment.lds.org/tag-photos, read the instructions, and click Start Activity. It will require you to enter your LDS Account username and password. (If you don’t have one, you can sign up at ldsaccount.lds.org.).
2. Look at the displayed photo from the Church’s image database, then add a title, brief description, and 4–6 search words you think people might use when searching for this kind of image.
3. Submit.

You can tag as many photos as you have time for. If you have questions, see the list of frequently asked questions. Today, only English tagging is available, but eventually the project will expand into other languages.

Photo tagging is a fun service activity for youth, young adults, or family home evening. If health problems keep you close to home, this is a convenient way to serve. Even the most technically challenged individual can participate.

You can also help by encouraging others to volunteer. For example, you could share this article on social media or add the opportunity to your ward newsletter or announcements.

Adapted from the Church News article “ Volunteer to Tag Photos to Make Images on LDS.org Easier to Find.”

500 helpers needed!

Love looking at photos? Want a useful way to spend half an hour each week on Sunday evenings or for Family Home Evenings? This is an interesting way to serve.

Member photographers have been sharing their photos for the Church to use in magazines, brochures, websites, and more.

Each photo must have search “key words” added so it can be easily found. We need 500 willing helpers of all ages to spend half an hour each week to add words to photos. This can be done alone, as a couple, or as a family.

Thousands of photos are waiting in the process and cannot be used until search words are added.

A few minutes of your time can make an immediate difference.

Interested? Learn more about helping LDS photos become findable.

“Community tagging” is one example. Unstructured information (blogs, emails, articles, and so forth) is harder to search than structured data like addresses, phone numbers, names, debits, and credits. One way to make unstructured information more searchable (and thus more accessible) is to “tag” it.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say I write a blog post that tells a story of a time when I was young and I learned by watching my father serve a widow on Christmas day, even though he wasn’t sure he’d get done in time to take care of the preparations for the holiday. If someone goes into Google and searches the Internet to find a story for a talk or a lesson then they will likely not come across this story.

However, the Internet (and this blog) allows the author to “tag” articles. Tagging is just assigning words to an article which describe it and thus make the article more likely to show up in searches (whether on a blog or on the Internet).

For the story I listed, I might use tags like faith, story, service, father, dad, christmas, and lesson. Notice that some of these words don’t show up in the story, but they still capture the essence of the story. If people then searched on any of these words, they would be more likely to find the story.

This approach is good, but the problem is that a) it presumes the  author knows the right tags for an article and b) it takes time.

“Community tagging” is a phenomenon where people on the Internet collectively tag other people’s content. This happens on web sites like Flickr and Facebook. People upload pictures and others can tag the pictures. This spreads the workload out and can make it more precise.

How might we use “community tagging” for Church-related content?