Section 2
Collecting Terms
Thesaurus construction requires collecting a set of
terms.
Some of these will end up becoming preferred terms
and others may not appear in the thesaurus at all
in their original form,
but they may suggest concepts that need to be covered in some
way.
Sources of Terms
Sources from which terms can be collected include
- existing lists of terms:
- other thesauri, indexes, dictionaries, glossaries, etc.
- texts from which terms can be extracted
- titles, abstracts, or full texts of indexed items
- queries by patrons
- people
- subject specialists, etc.
What Kinds of Terms Should You Collect?
Where possible,
terms in a thesaurus should be nouns
or noun phrases.
A term should be general enough
that it might be used to index a number of items.
For example,
a thesaurus usually does not include proper names.
But a term should not be so general
that it might be used to index too many of the items
in the thesaurus' subject area.
For example,
the term "NEWS" would not be much use
in a thesaurus for indexing news items.
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Section 1
Section 3
Table of
Contents
Glossary
Last updated January 25, 2008, by
Tim Craven
Copyright © 1997 The University of Western Ontario