Today the thesaurus is a widely used retrieval tool, chosen by many information workers, particularly those concerned with the management of electronic resources. There is an abundance of technical papers about specific aspects of thesauri and their applications to retrieval in the journal literature, but there is a real dearth of more basic reading material on the subject. This is a book about the principles and practice of thesaurus construction with rather more emphasis than is usual on the latter. It is intended to serve as an introduction to the topic for students of library and information science (LIS), and also to provide a relatively simple manual for practitioners who need an indexing tool for a specific local situation and have little option but to create their own. These practitioners may be librarians, knowledge managers, records managers, or indeed anyone who needs to organize information in any format. It should be of particular interest to the archive community whose professional education possibly covers less of the area of vocabulary building and maintenance than do traditional LIS courses.

It is difficult to know how to identify the members of this diverse group in an economical manner. Throughout the text I’ tended to refer to the practitioner as ‘the indexer’ and you may understand this to mean anyone concerned with the job of document analysis, description,and organization for retrieval.The term ‘document’ is also used in the widest possible sense to mean any kind of information-carrying item, in manuscript, print, or digital format, and in the form of books, papers, articles, reports, letters, websites, physical objects, and so on.

Although the book is entitled Essential Thesaurus Construction,because of the necessary preliminary of building a taxonomic structure from which to extract the thesaurus,there is an implicit subtitle … and essential taxonomy construction. Users will find that the book provides a basic method for building a structured vocabulary that can be used in more than one format for a range of subject retrieval purposes.