[pd-discuss] [okfn-labs] Best practice for OCR workflows (re OED 1st edition project)

Sun Aug 25 14:36:16 UTC 2013

On 8/24/13 6:28 AM, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> What do we need to move forward with an Open OED project [1]? It would
> be really cool if there were any way to break the dictionary down into
> entries that people could help to proofread and correct. Any thoughts on
> that front? Anyone else interested in helping?

Have the rights issues been sorted out?  Volumes 1-9 were published
before 1923, so they should be fair game in the US, but later volumes
may still be under copyright here.

In other countries, if the lifespan of credited
editors is used for copyright determination, the early
volumes might not be a problem (James Murray, for instance, died
in 1915), but the later volumes would (C. T. Onions, one of the
credited editors for later first-edition volumes, lived until 1965,
so he was still alive as recently as 50 years ago).  If people other
than the credited editors are relevant to determinations, things
could be locked up longer.

Looking at the issue a bit more broadly, even if a complete OED
is not currently in the public domain anywhere, it still might be
possible to use public domain portions of the OED to help seed an
independent project to trace the definitions and usage of words
through history. One couldn't call the resulting project the OED,
of course, but just as Wikipedia is a useful encyclopedia of its own,
such a project could be a very useful dictionary resource of its own.

John Mark Ockerbloom