December 2005 newsletter - Oxford English Dictionary

December 2005 newsletter - Oxford English Dictionary

see http://www.oed.com/pdfs/oed-news-2005-12.pdf

In June this year the OED launched its new electronic
editing system, Pasadena (or more fully, the
optimistically named Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing
Editorial and Notation Application). The launch
marked the conclusion of a very successful project
with input from every member of the department at
the different stages of consultation, design,
development, testing, and training. In particular the
success of the project owed much to the close and
happy collaboration between the Pasadena project
team, led by Laura Elliott, Michael Proffitt, and Tom
Gilmore, and the team of French software developers
from IDM, led by Alban Fonrouge, Philippe Climent,
and Marc Ariberti, which resulted in not only a
wonderful new system but also a whole new
vocabulary of Franglais for the OED. Thanks to the
efforts of all involved, the go-live period went very
smoothly. In the period since Chief Editor John
Simpson made the first ceremonial edits in the entry
for the noun panache, almost three thousand entries
have been edited in Pasadena, and the first batch of
entries has been extracted for publication.
The Pasadena project involved not only the creation of
a new computer system, but also the conversion of the
entire electronic text of the OED (containing
approximately a quarter of a million entries) and the
huge ‘Incomings’ database from the Dictionary’s
reading programmes (containing two million
quotations), into XML . .