Change Comes to the O.E.D.

The venerable Oxford English Dictionary, usually referred to as the O.E.D., is working on its third edition.  The last edition was published in 1989, and the editors had hoped to bring out the third edition in 2005.  The current guesstimate is that the third edition will come out in 2037!  A new editor, Michael Proffitt, has taken the helm of the O.E.D., and he has a different vision of the revered dictionary; he sees it as less "the heavy volumes of yore," and more "as a trove of invaluable data."  The New York Times recently interviewed Mr. Proffitt, who was very upbeat about the future of dictionaries, declaring in the article that "their time has come ... [p]eople need filters much more than they did in the past."  Some of the changes that he is contemplating include links to O.E.D. entries from digitized literature; more use by students (although he doesn't state how he would accomplish that); licensing O.E.D. data to other companies; more aggressive pricing; and "less stuffy definitions" pulled from blogs, Twitter feeds, and other untraditional sources.  One of the most interesting parts of the article comes at the end when the author, Tom Rachman, lists some words in common use today that have actually been in use for some time.  Some examples are OMG (first used in 1917) and Unfriend (first used in 1659).  

Kudos to Fred Shapiro

Congratulations to my old friend and former colleague Fred Shapiro, Associate Librarian for Collections & Access at Yale Law Library, who is praised in an article in the February 12, 2012 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. (A subscription is required to access the article). Donald Altschiller, a librarian at Boston University, highlights several reference works and their authors in "In Praise of Reference-Book Authors."

As someone who has worked in academic law libraries since 1984, I had not encountered (or even thought about) most of the reference works Altschiller writes about since library school. He eulogizes Joseph Nathan Kane, author of Famous First Facts, who died in 2002. I had no idea that Kane hosted a radio program during the 1930s also called Famous First Facts and that he later wrote questions for the TV program The $64,000 Question. Kane wrote nearly fifty other reference works and did most of his work at the New York Public Library, "methodically combing library stacks and card catalogs to produce authoritative reference works." Norbert Pearlroth, author of the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" column, also worked at the New York Public Library, and is described by Altschiller as one of the most "indefatigable and meticulous researchers of factual information." The other reference-book luminaries that Altschiller includes are Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, Peter Mark Roget, Henry Campbell Black of Black's Law Dictionary fame, and the Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer who compiled Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a literally irreplaceable reference work in the pre-Internet era.

More modern compilers of reference works are not neglected in Altschiller's piece, including Fred Shapiro, who employs "both painstaking book research along with modern library technology to produce landmark quotation books. His Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations ... [is] "the standard work for law quotations, and later his mammoth Yale Book of Quotations emerged as the pre-eminent general quotation reference work."

It was refreshing to read Altschiller's article and rediscover some favorite reference works and to be introduced to some new ones. At a time when Wikipedia is considered authoritative, many people seem not to recognize or value the meticulous, detail-oriented work that once went into creating high-quality reference works and that is a shame.