The Thesaurus: Review, Renaissance, and Revision / Edition 1

by Sandra K. Roe, Alan R Thomas

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780789019790
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/30/2004
Series:	Cataloging and Classification Quarterly Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	5.81(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Roe, Sandra K.; Thomas, Alan R

Table of Contents

• Introduction (Susan K. Roe and Alan R. Thomas)
• The Thesaurus: A Historical Viewpoint, with a Look to the Future (Jean Aitchison and Stella Dextre Clarke)
• Teach Yourself Thesaurus: Exercises, Readings, Resources (Alan R. Thomas)
• A Practical Exercise in Building a Thesaurus (James R. Shearer)
• Thesaurus Construction: Key Issues and Selected Readings (Marianne Lykke Nielsen)
• Thesaurus Consultancy (Leonard Will)
• Thesaurus Evaluation (Leslie Ann Owens and Pauline Atherton Cochrane)
• User Comprehension and Searching with Information Retrieval Thesauri (Jane Greenberg)
• Distributed Thesaurus Web Services (Eric H. Johnson)
• Tools of the Trade: Vocabulary Management Software (Melissa A. Riesland)
• Multilingual Subject Access: The Linking Approach of MACS (Patrice Landry)
• An Interview with Dr. Amy J. Warner (June 2003) (Alan R. Thomas and Sandra K. Roe)
• Index
• Reference Notes Included
  

Editorial Reviews

2 Stars from Doody

THIS BOOK IS THE MISSING LINK that connects 50 years of experience in traditional thesaurus construction to the age of the Internet. by uniting the substantial knowledge base about thesauri that resides within the field of library and information science with fresh insights into the use of controlled vocabularies on the World Wide Web, the editors have succeeded in assembling A TRULY VALUABLE TEXT. Whether you're an aspiring information architect of an experienced library professional, this book is REQUIRED READING. . . . PUTS HTML, XML, TOPIC MAPS, AND THE SEMANTIC WEB INTO CONTEXT.
—President, Semantic Studios; Co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

Peter Morville

A GREAT COLLECTION that explains what was, what is, and gives just a glimpse of what could be. . . . Brings together authors who have experience in all facets of the thesaurus world—creating, managing, teaching, leveraging, evaluating, consulting, selecting software, and speculating on future designs to support the use and exchange of thesauri.
—MSLIS, JD, Taxonomist, MSX User Assistance, Microsoft Corporation

Vivian Bliss

Reviewer: Malgorzata Fort, PhD (University of Pittsburgh)
Description: The concept of thesauri and controlled vocabulary is an interesting subject especially in the context of organizing the digital information. Fortunately, it is also a very encompassing subject, able to accommodate disparate papers representing different methodologies and a variety of styles and approaches to the main theme.
Purpose: Although I feel the editors did not always achieve integrity in presenting different aspects of thesaurus design, application, and possible future uses, they did manage to solicit many excellent contributions.
Audience: Thus, this pot of miscellanea can work to the book's advantage. It is not aimed at any one particular group of users, but different parts of the collection will appeal to different audiences: informationists, managers of Web content, students of information science, and the general public interested in new applications of thesauri.
Features: I highly recommend Johnson's paper on a proposed network of XML-based navigation services to provide better subject access to the WWW content. Equally good is Landry's presentation of international efforts to improve multilingual subject access to online catalogs. Likewise, the opening work presenting the historical development of thesaurus and outlining the key challenges of using the controlled vocabularies in effective Web searching is very much worth reading. I am certain the reader will also find Shearer's practical guide to thesaurus construction indispensable.
Assessment: This book is an interesting contribution to how we can use the same methods and techniques of thesauri designed for print resources to manage digital information. It stresses the need to update the standards for building thesaurus and to extend its traditional meaning to include other controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies. It includes insightful reports on how the use of controlled vocabularies on the Internet may evolve in the future.

Doody's Review Service