Katy McAdam
Project Manager
When I left Oxford University with a degree in Classics, I didn’t really have a firm idea of what I wanted to do other than a vague notion that I ‘wanted to do something with words’. After several unanswered letters to publishers all over London, I received an invitation from Bloomsbury Publishing to come in and do some work experience. It was a bit of shock to arrive and be directed not to the glamour of the fiction department, but instead to the reference section; I wasn’t even really sure what reference publishing was!
Anyway, after a day or so of photocopying and dealing with invoices, I was given a task which involved some things called headwords – and so I was introduced to the wonderful world of thesauruses and dictionaries which has now kept me busy for nearly 10 years.
My first project was helping (in a very junior way!) to coordinate the production of the synonym finder that works in the background in Microsoft Word. Once this was delivered, I moved on to helping out on the production of the Encarta World English Dictionary, which we were writing from scratch for Microsoft. During the lifetime of this project, I was involved in the etymologies (using that Classics background), the pronunciations, and also (in the frantic final days) in keying the seemingly endless rounds of corrections that brought the project to a successful close.
It was only once the Encarta World English Dictionary was finished that I moved over into project managing the first edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary. Since then I have been involved in project managing all the Macmillan dictionary titles – including a Spanish bilingual dictionary and the second edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary – as well as thesauruses, quotations books and numerous native speaker and subject dictionaries.
When I’m not poring over schedules and trying to work out the best ways of linking together the editorial and technical sides of producing a dictionary, I’m a member of a couple of choirs in London and can also be found working my way up and down a swimming pool most weekday mornings.