INSCRIPTION is the terminology standard maintained by FISHEN to provide a
set of peer reviewed wordlists for use in indexing heritage records. These
wordlists may come from FISHEN committee members, or be suggested by others.
To clarify the responsibilities for these lists both within the forum, and
in communication with other organisations I have prepared the following
draft 'Wordlist owners guide'. I would welcome comments and discussion on
the list of the content and coverage of the draft. 

Does it make the situation clear? Do you feel that, if you wanted to submit
a wordlist for inclusion in the INSCRIPTION framework, this gives you the
information you need?

I propose that, following consideration of this draft and approval of a
final version at the next committee meeting in November, that the document
be added to the archive for FISHEN documents, and possibly added on the
FISHEN web site.

INSCRIPTION - Wordlist owners guide. DRAFT

INSCRIPTION is a framework of available standard wordlists created or
approved by members of FISHEN, the Forum on Information Standards in
Heritage (England). These wordlists are designed to supplement the MIDAS
data standard for use in recording England's archaeological and
architectural heritage. The intention is to make searching of these records
easier, and promote the vision of sharing the knowledge of England's past.

INSCRIPTION provides 
*	details of wordlists to assist potential users in finding the
wordlist that best suits their needs;
*	access to the wordlists, where possible, through the World Wide Web.

In what follows the phrase 'the wordlist owner' means either the author of
the wordlist if represented on FISHEN, or a member of FISHEN who is
sponsoring the use of a wordlist compiled by an organisation not represented
on FISHEN (e.g. the Getty Institute).

These notes set out the responsibilities of wordlist owners for the lists
that they create or maintain on behalf of FISHEN as part of INSCRIPTION.

INSCRIPTION practice is to use the term 'wordlist'  to include all indexing
terminology, including thesauri and hierarchical wordlists as well as simple
wordlists.

Creation of wordlists

FISHEN uses the following guidelines covering the content of wordlists that
are intended for inclusion in INSCRIPTION. Wordlists created by other
standards organisations will have their own guidelines.

*	Terms should be consistent in the use of case and spelling.
*	A wordlist should relate to a single unit of information in the
MIDAS standard.
*	Punctuation should be avoided.
*	Terms should be singular rather than plural.
*	Natural word order should be used for terms.
*	Every term should have an adequate definition or scope note.
*	Whole-word terms are preferred to codes or abbreviations. Where
codes are unavoidable a whole-word term or phrase should be given in a
separate field or column in the list in addition to the code.

Restricting the maximum length of terms in the wordlist to 60 characters,
and the length of the scope note to 255 characters will assist in the
dissemination of wordlists intended for use with Microsoft Access software.

Submission of wordlists for inclusion in INSCRIPTION

The wordlist owner should prepare a description of the wordlist following
the format given on the INSCRIPTION web site, maintained by the mda
http://www.mda.org.uk/fishen/. Copies of the description and of the proposed
wordlist should be made available to FISHEN members for review. A copy of
the proposed list and the description of the wordlist should be passed to
the FISHEN web site manager (care of the mda) for inclusion of the list and
description in the INSCRIPTION pages. Wordlists awaiting approval by FISHEN
will be given the Status of  'Candidate'.

Copyright

(Note: This section relates only to wordlists created by FISHEN members.
Wordlists created outside of the FISHEN / INSCRIPTION framework  will be the
copyright of the authors).

The wordlist owner (or more usually their employing organisation) will
initially hold the copyright to the wordlist, and this will be recorded in
the INSCRIPTION description. Copyright, can, if required, be transferred by
mutual agreement to another FISHEN member. 

Note that FISHEN policy is that  wordlists which have been produced by
member organisations and which are included in INSCRIPTION should not be
commercially exploited. Any charges made for the wordlist should cover only
reproduction, postage and packaging costs. 

Maintenance

The wordlist owner will be generally responsible for the process of
managing, updating and altering the wordlist in response to suggestions from
list users. The wordlist owner should identify a contact who can be
approached to deal with candidate terms, requests for copies of the list,
comments on the content and structure, and generally to champion the
adoption of the wordlist.

Major changes to the wordlist content or structure may require separate
submission of the revised wordlist to FISHEN. Details of the earlier version
may be retained in INSCRIPTION but marked as 'Closed' once the revised
version has been accepted.

The wordlist owner remains responsible for the description of the wordlist
in INSCRIPTION, and should advise FISHEN of any relevant changes needed to
keep the description current.

Transferring list ownership

List ownership may be transferred between FISHEN members by mutual
arrangement. The new list owner becomes responsible for maintenance of the
wordlist. Transfer of list ownership does not imply, and is a separate issue
to, transfer of copyright.




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