The preparatory work on the vocabulary has now been completed, and all that remains is to create the individual entries that will form the alphabetical display.

Management of the thesaurus data

At this stage you will need to think about how the thesaurus data will be permanently held and maintained. You will need to create a ‘record’ for each entry term in the vocabulary, which will consist of:

For the purpose of maintaining the thesaurus over time, you may also want to add information about when terms were added or deleted, changes in terms, as well as information about who did what and why. If you also hope to revise or update the systematic structure, you may have to add some information about the level of indentation and other display features. Various means of holding the data will make these tasks easier.

In bringing the vocabulary to its present state I have maintained it as a series of Word files. This method allows easy editing in respect of the insertion, rearrangement and modification of terms in the systematic display, where the context is apparent, but is probably less than ideal for the thesaurus format where the thesaural relationships are the central feature. It's very difficult to sort the records alphabetically to achieve the A–Z format, and you will have to insert each record into the sequence as you go along, which requires a lot of scrolling up and down. Nevertheless, there is no reason why a small vocabulary cannot be maintained as a text file if your resources are limited.

For most situations some sort of database will offer the best solution. There is a more detailed discussion of specialist thesaurus software in Chapter 19, but any general database application could be used. A spreadsheet can also perform quite well for a modest thesaurus, since the relationships between ‘fields’ in the vocabulary are usually very straightforward.