The Electronic Scottish National Dictionary (eSND): Work in Progress Susan Rennie University of Dundee, UK Abstract The Scottish National Dictionary {SND) is the standard historical dictionary of modern Scots, covering the period from 1700 to the present. This paper describes the current project to digitize the SND to produce the eSND, which will eventually be output on the Internet. It includes a brief description of the SND itself, outlining its history, content, and structure, and describes how the eSND will differ from the printed text. The various stages of the eSND project are discussed, using examples from the work in progress: (1) the data capture, which is being achieved through scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) of the printed text; (2) the conversion of the OCR data to full Extensible Markup Language mark-up, including details of the actual mark-up scheme (which is based on the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines), and how this has been adapted to suit the SND text; (3) the integration of the original Supple- ment and new material; (4) the development of search tools and a Web inter- face. Details are also 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. Correspondence: Susan Rennie, Dictionary of the Scots Language Department of English, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN E-mail: rennimackillop@sol.co.uk 1 History of the SND The Electronic Scottish National Dictionary {eSND) project aims to produce an electronic, Internet version of the Scottish National Dictionary (SND). The SND is a ten-volume, historical dictionary, which covers the modern Scots language from 1700 to the present. Compilation of the SND began in 1929, under the editorship of William Grant, a phonetician who had been researching the dialects of Scots for many years previously. It was continued on Grant's death in 1946 by David Murison, who edited the bulk of the dictionary (roughly from the letter D onwards) (Grant and Murison, 1931-76). Publication was in fascicles, with the last sec- tions (comprising a Supplement to the earlier volumes) being published in 1976. As well as a wide-ranging reading scheme to collect citations from written sources, the SND editors also carried out an ambitious oral © Oxford University Press 2001 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16,No.2,2001 153 at Glasgow University Library on January 22, 2017 http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from