Posted at the request of Louise.

Carl Boardman
Oxfordshire Record Office

Oxfordshire Record Office is a section of Cultural Services in Oxfordshire
County Council. This message is intended only for the addressee, and OCC can
take no responsibility for the accuracy of the information contained
therein, nor should the message be held as having any legal validity.


-----Original Message-----
From: Craven, Louise [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 3:48 PM
To: 'Boardman, Carl - Cultural Services'
Subject: RE: Subject Indexes


Carl

Hello

You may wish to know about the PRO and about the Unesco Thesaurus Working
Party (UTWP).

The PRO has used the UNESCO Thesaurus for the subject indexing of PROCAT,
its public catalogue. All additions made to the UNESCO thesaurus terms in
the process of subject indexing the PRO's holdings, with their places of
addition to the UNESCO hierarchical structure, are available at
http://www.pro.gov.uk/archives.

Realisation of the need to add terms to the UNESCO Thesaurus, and also of
the importance of doing so in a way which could be agreed by all users of
the UNESCO Thesaurus in the UK archival community, led to the formation of
the Unesco Thesaurus Working Party (UTWP) at the end of 1999.

Precisely because colleagues using the UNESCO Thesaurus wanted to be aware
of additions made by other offices, we made ours available on our website -
in the hope that at some stage the UK archival community would have access
to a thesaurus which would present an on-line subject standard and which
would enable additions to be made to it.

The UTWP is currenty drawing up a funding application for the establishment
of a UK Archival Thesaurus. This will enable all archival users of the
UNESCO Thesaurus to propose new terms, will establish a central editorial
facility to establish a process of peer review by which agreed terms can be
added to the thesaurus, and will allow the updated archival thesaurus to be
made available as soon as possible following addition. The application will
be submitted within the next few months.

Please let me know if you would like more information, or if any point is
not clear. By all means send this to the list if you think it would be
useful.

Best wishes

Louise Craven

> ----------
> From: Boardman, Carl - Cultural
> Services[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Reply To: Boardman, Carl - Cultural Services
> Sent: 23 April 2002 14:11
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Subject Indexes
>
> Oh dear, always a tricky one. Natural reticence in making public anything
> someone has told you directly rather than putting it on the list. But I
> don't think I've been told anything seriously confidential, and I can only
> apologise if I have and am making it generally available.
>
> UNESCO is used to some degree at the UK National Digital Archive of
> Datasets, some of the SW CROs who are adding additional vocabulary control
> systems ( and are taking account of the need to link with colleagues in
> related disciplines), and Somerset RO (who responded directly and have
> added
> about the same number of their own terms, and tend to use UNESCO for
> high-level grouping rather than directly as subject terms, because it is
> so
> high level). NAHSTE at Edinburgh University loosely base their
> hierarchical
> system on UNESCO, but bring in Library of Congress terms. DS Ltd have
> purchased the UNESCO thesaurus for use with CALM (but, as far as I can
> tell,
> are not yet in a position to make it available - I may stand to be
> corrected
> on this), leading to a feeling that there should at least be some
> compatibility with UNESCO in any system adopted. Willpower directed me to
> their useful website (http://www.willpowerinfo.co.uk) where there is a
> discussion of principles and techniques. More directly, my attention was
> drawn to the JSA article by David Jones on the Shropshire's Past Unfolded
> Project (Oct 2001, p149) and the way they had approached the question,
> while
> more than one respondent told me about the index created by West Yorks
> which
> they have supplied to other offices. I am currently asking for more
> information on this last.
>
> All this would seem to highlight (a) that offices recognise the
> desirability
> of a standardised index to facilitate exchange of information, but (b)
> that
> of all areas, subject indexing is the most difficult because of the
> multiplicity of levels involved. Greater Manchester I am told (not by
> Greater Manchester) pointed out with regard to UNESCO that any thesaurus
> which does not include "cotton manufacture" would need some work doing on
> it
> from their point of view, and I think this exemplifies perfectly the
> problem. My wife is an archivist in the Oxford college system, and we have
> long been aware that what for the Record Office would be a minor
> sub-sub-sub
> term would be a major generic for her (eg. college clubs and societies
> would
> probably be as far down as we would go, but would be a starting point in a
> college). Nevertheless, there must be some community within the county
> record office network (cotton manufacture is not something we find in
> Oxfordshire, but I can see exactly where it would go in a subject index)
> and
> obviously as researchers become increasingly involved in searching
> catalogues over the Web it would be helpful if they could do so using
> standard terms.
>
> What is needed is an agreed standard on which individual office terms can
> be
> mapped, and UNESCO seems to have emerged because it exists, despite the
> need
> to do quite extensive mapping on it. If Oxfordshire can find a system on
> which 90% of that mapping has been done, leaving us to fine down with the
> terms unique to our collections, we would be only too happy to take it on.
>
> Carl Boardman
> Oxfordshire Record Office
>
> Oxfordshire Record Office is a section of Cultural Services in Oxfordshire
> County Council. This message is intended only for the addressee, and OCC
> can
> take no responsibility for the accuracy of the information contained
> therein, nor should the message be held as having any legal validity.
>


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