Credo Reference has a Corporate Advisory Board made up of a number of interesting and talented individuals, some of whom are from the library and publishing world, and others who are not. We think that these varied perspectives help make our company stronger and more relevant. Recently, Credo’s President, John Dove, conducted some interviews with our Board members. The first was with Erin McKean.
Erin McKean likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She was most recently Chief Consulting Editor for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, and was the editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2e, and now is CEO of Wordnik, an online corpus-based dictionary for word lovers worldwide. She is the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly and the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That’s Amore (also about words). Previously, she was the editorial manager for the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries at ScottForesman, a Pearson company. She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech. She also serves on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
John: What about Credo has captured your attention?
Erin: Credo is doing great work in helping to reduce the friction associated with doing reference-based research, by making more resources, from more publishers, available in more ways to more people than ever before.
John: How does the work and mission of Credo Reference intersect with your world?
Erin: Credo is helping researchers be more informed users of individual reference sources — when you see linked and related results it’s easier to be aware that different sources have different methodologies, emphases, and, sometimes, even biases. It’s more important than ever to be a critical consumer of information, and Credo makes it easier to learn this important skill.
Since I’m working to get readers to be more critical consumers of lexical information, I’m very interested in how Credo encourages critical comparisons without discouraging users!
John: What are one or two “classics” that you think should be on the Credo team’s recommended reading list?
Erin:”Caught In the Web of Words,” the biography of John Murray, the first editor of the OED (written by his granddaughter) and “Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography,” by Sidney Landau.
John: What are one or two current books that you think the Credo team should be familiar with to understand current and future trends?
Erin: “Here Comes Everybody,” by Clay Shirky, and “The Long Tail,” by Chris Anderson.
John: What are you up to these days that you’d like the Credo community to know about?
Erin: I’m working on a new startup project — Wordnik.com. Our goal is to show as much information as we can find about every word in the English language (it will take us a while). “Information” can be anything from example sentences and dictionary definitions to images from Flickr, “tweets” from Twitter, and user-contributed tags. We’ve just gotten underway, and it’s very exciting!
Many thanks to Erin for being a member of our Advisory Board, and for answering our questions!
