The Electronic Scottish National Dictionary: Work in Progress

The Scottish National Dictionary (SND) is the standard historical dictionary of modern Scots, covering the period from 1700 to the present. This presentation will describe the current project to digitise the SND to produce the eSND, which will eventually be output on the Internet. It will include a brief description of the SND itself, outlining its history, content and structure, and describe how the eSND will differ from the printed text, in particular by integrating the original Supplement and adding new material from the SNDA's ongoing research. The various stages of the eSND project will then be discussed, using examples from the work in progress:

the data capture, which is being done through scanning and OCR of the printed text;
the conversion of the OCR data to full XML mark-up, including details of the actual mark-up scheme (which is based on the TEI guidelines), and how this has been adapted to suit the SND text;
the integration of the original Supplement and new material;
the development of search tools and a web interface.
Details will also be given of the new proposal to combine the eSND with an electronic version of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (eDOST), sharing the same mark-up scheme, search software and interface, to produce a comprehensive electronic resource covering Scots from the early medieval period to the present day.