Richard A. Gray

Thomas Clarkson and the Anti‐Slavery Society

In a previous issue of Serials Review, I described the three international organizations that I then assumed were the principal ones concerned with the protection of threatened tribal peoples throughout the world. I now know that I had overlooked one very important organization that is in fact coterminous with the organized effort to eradicate slavery. Until very recently, that organization was known as the Anti‐Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights. Gales Encyclopedia of Associations: International Organizations places the foundation of this society in 1839, a date that is off by fifty‐one years, inasmuch as it can be shown that the society under at least two earlier names is continuous with the society that emerged, reorganized, redefined, and renamed in 1839 and with the society that remains vigorously active today.

The New Oxford English Dictionary and the Uses of Machine‐Readable Dictionaries

Any major dictionary needs to be continuously updated to keep current with the rapid growth of language. Faced with the need for such endless supplementation, Oxford University Press, in considering the available choices, concluded that automating the Oxford English Dictionary offered the only practicable solution. Traditional “cut‐and‐paste” methods of revision were ruled out as inadequate to meet the requirements of a task of such staggering proportions. But even if Oxford University Press had not planned to revise or enhance the Oxford English Dictionary, automation would still have brought enormous benefits to those who make extraordinary demands on dictionaries, for a traditional printed dictionary is a very unsatisfying reference tool in many ways, serving only if its conditions of strict lineality are accepted. If, on the other hand, an unreasonable demand of a dictionary is made, such as “Print out two carefully dated lists of all English adjectives ending in ‐ic and ‐ical,” then the traditional d...