New staff

We have recently appointed nine new members of editorial staff on the OED project, the outcome of a very thorough and successful recruitment exercise which attracted over eight hundred applications. We already have another three successful candidates lined up to start in January 1995, and further appointments will be made next year.

The new recruits face the prodigious task of not only getting to grips with the complexity of the OED text and editorial conventions, but also of learning the mass of detail necessary to handle it efficiently in electronic form. Old hands who started in the more low-tech days of the OED Supplement were able to absorb the advent of computers in a more leisurely fashion, but the OED department is now an extraordinary mixture of traditional academic research and electronic wizardry; an average day can involve anything from wrestling with the minutiae of manuscripts and textual dating to discussions on computer tags and editing systems.

Revision work has started in the letter M, largely because the OED's structure and policy had not been fully determined at the beginning of the alphabet, and so it seems more sensible to begin in an area where the text is more regular.

As it happens, this is also where we started work for the second edition back in 1984, so those of us who have never actually worked in A may still have a long wait!