Phil Carlisle

Data Standards Supervisor

English Heritage

National Monuments Record Centre

Kemble Drive

Swindon

SN2 2GZ

+44 (0)1793 414824

http://thesaurus.english-heritage.org.uk/

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P Please do not print this e-mail unless you really need to

Dear Lee

We have done a similar thing here in Herefordshire. As Crispin outlined, we imported the thesuarus into our Access 2000 database, then extracted the "index" "preferred" terms, including the scope notes. The resulting table is now used as our Monument Type look-up table, and data entry in the Monument Type fields is limited to list terms only to ensure consistent data entry. We add candidate terms to the list and use a separate numbering system for the term id so that they can be easily identified as candidate terms. We also had to do a considerable amount of data cleaning to get our existing data to comply with thesaurus terms - this took about 3-4 days. When the new version of the thesaurus was released, we had to do the import and extraction again, and then re-add our candidate terms. This was not too onerous, but it depends how often it will have to be done ! 

We have not had any problems regarding the size of the list, but it is definitely very cumbersome to use compared to the thesaurus functionality that is available in HBSMR. It is OK when I know exactly (or even roughly !) what term to use, but when I need to search for a term when I am unsure what to use, I either have to search the scope note and/or term name, which has the disadvantage of not having the hierarchical structure so I can't see related/narrow/broad terms, or look it up on-line, which has the disadvantage of not being able to do a scope note search, and then go back and pick the right term from the lookup table. Sometimes I have to use a combination of both. Either method is clunky and time-consuming, but it is all we have at the moment.

You are welcome to contact me off-list or by phone if you think it would be helpful to know more about our experiences.

All the best

Lucie

PS perhaps I could use this opportunity for a quick plea to the NMR to think about adding scope note search functionality to the on-line thesaurus - it would be really useful to us non-HBSMR users !