Thesaurus, Thesauri, Thesaurum!

Over the past year and a half I have been leading a project of archivists and records managers to develop a functions thesaurus of terms describing the functions of corporate body record creators. The intended use of the thesaurus is to help records managers classify records in their custody and help archivists appraise and describe (through finding aids, MARC21 records, and EAD markups) the records of such corporate bodies. The progress is slow as we wade through each term in the thesaurus (now numbering above 350) and finalize the BT, NT, RT, USE, USEFOR, and examples for each term. We expect to be done sometime before the next century. Ha!

In the past six weeks or so we have seen a really great thesaurus come out for use by college and university archivists. The thesaurus was almost a one woman job and it is fantastic, though some have complained (and rightly so) that there is no interactive web-based software engine to help one navigate and search the terms in that thesaurus. Something like the open source TemaTres was suggested. That is the software the functions thesaurus will eventually end up in.

When we began looking at the functions thesaurus and whether it had a need in the RM and archival worlds, we ran into some obstacles. One of these was a small group of state archives workers who had worked on the functions aspect of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) many, many years ago. But our group discovered that the functions terms in this thesaurus had not been updated and were not in any consistent format, something all the literature we could find on the construction of thesauri told us we need to have. So we decided that if the AAT was not updated on a regular basis, that we were going to create a thesaurus that was new. And so we are doing so now.

But a few weeks ago I was contacted by someone from the SAA Electronic Records Roundtable that asked if I knew of a good genre/form thesaurus and whether one was being used or created or updated. I responded that the AAT has genre/form terms, but told the person something like "good luck finding them!" He only wanted to add the term "electronic records," but I am trying to persuade him and others to form anothe group to standardize genre/form headings and make them consistent, something the AAT does not do and that needs to be done to fit current scholarly and practical models.

I'm curious what my readers' experiences are in using thesauri?