3. Conclusions

I have outlined a few basic ways in which scholars from different disciplines might want to approach these texts. These lists are not exhaustive; they are a point of departure. The types of information we need to be able to retrieve from the dictionaries require certain types of access software: word index with search and retrieval; search and retrieval of tagged elements; hypertext linking. The first might be taken care of more or less automatically. The potential for automatic sorting of the second type depends on the complexity of the tags, although we have suggested some shortcuts. The third is necessarily a collaborative project, and the technical and intellectual problems of that collaboration are not trivial. The results however should remove dictionary research from the category of secondary drudgery to primary intellectual investigation.

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