Hi all,

This is from SHARP-L, a book history list. I thought we might find some very knowledgeable people here (and on DC, where I'll also be sending it).

You should make should you include the cc'd person (Jack Lynch) in your responses, as I don't believe he is on either DM or DC.

-dan

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Reference Projects Interrupted Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:21:06 -0400 From: Jack Lynch jlynch@ANDROMEDA.RUTGERS.EDU Reply-To: SHARP-L Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing SHARP-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU To: SHARP-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU

Dear all,

I'm collecting stories of reference works (or other large-scale publishing projects) that have been interrupted in mid-course by the rise of electronic publishing -- cases in which plans that made sense when the project began have been scrapped because of the transformative effects of the Internet.

The first example to come to my mind was the third edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature -- the whole was commissioned some years ago, and vol. 4 (1800-1900), ed. Joanne Shattuck, appeared in 1999, but the whole project was abandoned a few years ago when CUP realized it would be impossible to sell the hard-copy volumes, and couldn't think of a way to recover costs on an on-line version. All the contributors were released from their contracts, the project has been dropped, and vol. 4 remains orphaned in libraries.

Of course plenty of long-term projects have taken advantage of new technologies. When I first spoke with John Simpson about OED3 in the '90s, he said the plan was still for a print version; the most recent time I spoke with the OED lexicographers, they said a print edition is unlikely -- still, the project goes on apace, and it continues to get plenty of resources. I'm more interested in genuine interrputions, whether wholesale abandonment, significant trimming of expectations, dropping of a major institutional sponsor, or what-have-you.

Have any of the major encyclopedia or dictionary publishers officially called it quits? -- are decades-long works like the Corpus vitrearum medii aevi still going ahead?

I'll be able to make the most sense of English-language examples, but there's no need to stick to them exclusively.