Keywords
Citation
Calvert, P. (2001), "Thesaurus Construction and Use: A Practical Manual", The Electronic Library, Vol. 19 No. 5, pp. 352-356. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2001.19.5.352.2
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This manual seems to have been around forever. Indeed, the first edition was published in 1972, and the second not until 1987. That the third was published in 1997 and this, the fourth, only three years later, is evidence of the enormous changes occurring in information retrieval as a result of the introduction of computerized databases, access to full text documents and of course, the Web. The authors are aware that thesauri are scarcely visible to most Web searchers, but the demand for better information storage and retrieval is being felt in more ways than ever before as organizations that have never had to deal with knowledge organization discover that making sense of the corporate Web site isn’t nearly so trivial as was once believed. The new edition includes examples of Web‐based thesauri and the implications of using a thesaurus for organizing documents on the Web.
After some short introductory chapters, the main and technical part of the manual lies in chapters on the topics of vocabulary control, specificity and compound terms, structure and relationship, and auxiliary retrieval devices. The reader will appreciate that these chapters give guidance on the selection of preferred terms and guidance on the form of terms, the degree of specificity to use in a thesaurus, adding the relationships between terms (equivalence, hierarchical, and associative), and finally the use of extra devices such as logical operators, links, roles, and weighting. Other chapters are on standards for thesaurus construction and development, thesaurus displays, multilingual thesauri, and on construction techniques and management. The writing is crisp with scarcely an unnecessary word. There are copious examples to support the instructions in the manual. Having just used this book to help me write a workshop on just this topic, I can vouch for its value. There is a very lengthy bibliography including numerous recent documents on the Web and thesaurus construction.
To put it simply, this is still the best guide to creating a thesaurus that you will find. It is essential to all library schools, and even if you have an old edition you will need to buy this one for the additional material on the construction of Web thesauri. If only we could persuade colleagues in related disciplines such as business information systems that the traditional methods of information storage and retrieval have a lot to offer them!