Prepress

Oxford University Press Chooses PubFactory to Develop Oxford English Dictionary

Thursday 05. August 2010 - iFactory, an award-winning web design and development firm, today announced that Oxford University Press (OUP) has chosen iFactory's online publishing platform, PubFactory, to develop the relaunched version of the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books. The new version of the OED will include the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and new functionality such as the ability to search and browse the OED by a wide variety of criteria including subject, region, usage, or language of origin; see detailed information about the major sources of the OED; view search results as a timeline; and personalize the resource by saving searches and entries to a personal profile.
“The OED has been a pioneering digital project,” said Robert Faber, Editorial Director, Scholarly and General Reference at OUP. “Building a new version is a great opportunity to present the information locked in the OED database in what we believe is a much more accessible, dynamic, and productive way, while maintaining its reliability and scholarly authority. iFactory has been great to work with on such a core project — they bring real creativity in design, understanding of user behaviour, and engineering savvy, but also understand the importance and value of the OED to its many readers, and to OUP.”
The selection of PubFactory for OED continues a long-standing relationship between iFactory and OUP. Among some of the Web design and development projects where OUP has partnered with iFactory are Oxford Dictionaries Online, Oxford Bibliographies Online, Oxford Language Dictionaries Online, Oxford Biblical Studies Online, which received an APA PROSE Award for “Best in Reference Works”, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which received an International Information Industry Award for “Best User Experience”.
“We are thrilled to have been chosen to develop the new version of the OED,” said Tom Beyer, iFactory’s Director of Publishing. “We are hoping to enhance its online presence to match its preeminent position in the world of scholarship. With the addition of the new historical thesaurus and a variety of interface enhancements, we feel that this will set a new standard for reference works.”