Thesaurus Construction And Use

A practical guide to the construction of thesauri for use in information retrieval, written by leading experts in the field. Includes: planning and design; vocabulary control; specificity and compound terms; structure and relationships; auxiliary retrieval devices; multilingual thesauri; AAT Compound Term Rules. The US ANSI/NISO Z39.19 Thesaurus construction standard is also covered.

Many information professionals working in small units today fail to find the published tools for subject based organization that are appropriate to their local needs, whether they are archivists, special librarians, information officers, or knowledge or content managers. Large established standards for document description and organization are too unwieldy, unnecessarily detailed, or too expensive to install and maintain. In other cases the available systems are insufficient for a specialist environment, or don't bring things together in a helpful way. A purpose built, in-house system would seem to be the answer, but too often the skills necessary to create one are lacking. This practical text examines the criteria relevant to the selection of a subject management system, describes the characteristics of some common types of subject tool, and takes the novice step-by-step through the process of creating a system for a specialist environment. The methodology employed is a standard technique for the building of a thesaurus that incidentally creates a compatible classification or taxonomy, both of which may be used in a variety of ways for document or information management. Key areas covered are: What is a thesaurus? Tools for subject access and retrieval What a thesaurus is used for Why use a thesaurus? Examples of thesauri The structure of a thesaurus Thesaural relations Practical thesaurus construction The vocabulary of the thesaurus Building the systematic structure Conversion to alphabetic format Forms of entry in the thesaurus Maintaining the thesaurus Thesaurus software The wider environment. Readership: Although primarily aimed at the practising information professional, the book is also suitable for students of library and information science.

Use this single source to uncover the origin and development of the thesaurus! The Thesaurus: Review, Renaissance, and Revision examines the historical development of the thesaurus and the standards employed for thesaurus construction. This book provides both the history of thesauri and tutorials on usage to increase your understanding of thesaurus creation, use, and evaluation. This reference tool offers essential information on thesauri in the digital environment, including Web sites, databases, and software. For 50 years, the thesaurus has been a core reference book; The Thesaurus: Review, Renaissance, and Revision celebrates this history and speculates on the future of vocabulary-switching tools. This book will familiarize you with contemporary and emerging functions of thesauri, including international and multilingual developments. The Thesaurus: Review, Renaissance, and Revision provides information and library professionals—including indexers, abstractors, subject catalogers, classifiers, and reference librarians—a historical overview of the thesaurus and its past as well as recent developments. This book also gives patrons, readers, and researchers more effective techniques in vocabulary management and offers insight on how thesauri are devised and compiled. This book addresses: changing definitions, characteristics, functions, and applications of thesauri the value of standards, evaluation, use and review of software, and role and work of consultants during thesauri construction and maintenance multicultural issues that affect thesauri creation, such as mapping and interoperability education and training The Thesaurus: Review, Renaissance, and Revision also provides you with extensive bibliographies related to issues and problems in thesaurus construction and design, such as developing standards in support of electronic thesauri.

Relationships abound in the library and information science (LIS) world. Those relationships may be social in nature, as, for instance, when we deal with human relationships among library personnel or relationships (i. e. , "public relations") between an information center and its clientele. The relationships may be educational, as, for example, when we examine the relationship between the curriculum of an accredited school and the needs of the work force it is preparing students to join. Or the relationships may be economic, as when we investigate the relationship between the cost of journals and the frequency with which they are cited. Many of the relationships of concern to us reflect phenomena entirely internal to the field: the relationship between manuscript collections, archives, and special collections; the relationship between end user search behavior and the effectiveness of searches; the relationship between access to and use of information resources; the relationship between recall and precision; the relationship between various bibliometric laws; etc. The list of such relationships could go on and on. The relationships addressed in this volume are restricted to those involved in the organization of recorded knowledge, which tend to have a conceptual or semantic basis, although statistical means are sometimes used in their discovery.

Covers planning and design of thesaurus systems, thesaurus construction standards, vocabulary control, specifity and compound terms, structure, and auxiliary retrieval devices. Discusses possible forms of thesaurus presentation, different types of thesauri, including multilingual thesauri merged vocabularies and searching thesauri, and looks at maintenance and updating, and computer aids.