Resumen de The Orkney Dictionary: Creating an Online Dictionary Efficiently from a Printed Book

Thomas Widmann, Phyllis Buchanan

• great number of older dictionaries were compiled before the world of lexicography moved into the digital era. The result is that many older texts exist only in book format even though they contain a wealth of information that could still be extremely relevant today. A great deal of work went into these historical texts and some smaller languages and dialects are represented only in this format. Losing this information simply because the cost involved in digitising such resources is prohibitive would represent a wasted opportunity. In this paper we will demonstrate an efficient and cost-effective solution for converting these paper products into online resources. We will base the paper on the conversion of The Orkney Dictionary which we undertook in 2016.

  In our approach, the book goes through the following phases: we began with the paper book, moved onto visual markup (HTML), this was converted to a simple tagging structure which formed the basis for the XML and then HTML. Finally the text was put into WordPress. Despite the numerous steps involved, many of them are standard components that can be reused, which is why it constitutes an efficient, low-cost way forward for retrodigitisation