Aim

The Mario Rostoni Library’s thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary built bottom-up, mainly starting from documents of the economic-business and legal area. ThESS was born and grows in relation to the acquisitions of the Library and the need to express books’ contents to encourage research by subject.

It is used for the following functions:

  • Cataloguing of acquired library material: the terms of the thesaurus are assigned to each bibliographic entry as keywords and combined by the cataloguers in coextensive subject strings, to express the subject of the book.
  • Retrieval of documents: thesaurus terms allow to retrieve documents, through their combination via search bar or by browsing through lists.
  • Terminological-conceptual analysis in research processes: the relationships between the terms of the thesaurus allow to enrich the terminology relating to a research area or topic, driving to other similar words to be employed in the library catalog or any other tool. This use of the thesaurus is extensively presented within the Information Literacy courses of the Bachelor and Master degree courses of LIUC University.

Target audience

ThESS was born with a focus on the needs of the study and research community consisting of students, researchers and teachers of the Faculties of Business Administration, Management Engineering and Law of Carlo Cattaneo University - LIUC. It can also be useful to librarians, cataloguers and information specialists, who manage bibliographic and documentary collections of the same disciplinary areas.

History of the thesaurus of the Mario Rostoni Library

The thesaurus ThESS was created in the early 1990s from a pioneering experience on creating coextensive subject strings from descriptors in the wake of the British Library experience with PRECIS. The original project was subsequently modified several times as regards the syntactic structure of the subject strings, but alongside these, the presence of a thesaurus remained constant. The growth in number of allowed terms (the result from the cataloguing of books gradually acquired by the library) allowed to reach the threshold of 5000 terms already in 2000. Since then, the growth rate has been around 200 terms per year.

Semantic metadata was managed through the H&T Zetesis catalog software until 2021; then through proprietary software. ThESS is also available through a SKOS output.

The thesaurus was created and edited by Piero Cavaleri, who now advises on the maintenance and development of the thesaurus. Sara Vago and Luisa Venuti collaborated. Currently the tool is edited by Chiara Pinciroli and developed by Riccardo Micheloni, while Laura Ballestra takes care of the user feed-back analysis and Alberto Re Fraschini looks after the software and visualization.

Structure

ThESS is a multi-disciplinary, mono-hierarchical thesaurus structured in categories comprising approximately 8100 terms. It includes proper names. It is compiled in accordance with ISO 25964-1 (2011) and BS 8723-1/2 (2005).

The five basic categories in which the thesaurus is organised are:

  • Attributes (properties of things, materials and actions)
  • Entities
  • Actions
  • Space
  • Time

Following the terms indicating the fundamental categories, we find the first level of the hierarchy of terms. For example, for terms relating to entities, the first level is:

  • Personality
  • Instruments
  • Bodies
  • Objects
  • Matter
  • Causes
  • Consequences

The grouping criteria identified for sets of terms linked to the same term by a hierarchical relationship are represented by means of expressions (grouping labels) placed in square brackets.

Example:
"Small and medium-sized enterprises", "Large enterprises", are "Enterprises" according to size (grouping label: "[Enterprises according to size]")

Language

All the terms are in Italian, except when an English term has been accepted by the specific reference literature in that meaning without any translation (this is typical in economic-business disciplines).

Qualifiers

They are used to distinguish homograph terms with different meanings, and are expressed in round brackets.

Example:
"Company (Organisations)" means a type of organisation according to legal form, as opposed to: "Company" in the meaning of "collectivity"

Hierarchical relationship

It is the relationship between terms whose meanings are placed in relation to each other on a level of greater or lesser significance than the representation of extralinguistic objects.

Examples:
"Airplanes" is more significant than (indicates a set of objects with certain characteristics than) "Aircraft", which in turn is more significant than "Means of transport"
"Means of transport" is less significant than (indicates a set of objects with indeterminate characteristics than) "Aircraft", which in turn is less significant than "Airplanes".
"Retail trade" is more significant than (indicates an action with certain characteristics than) "Trade", which in turn is more significant than "Economic Activities", and so on.

In particular cases, the part/all relationship is included among the hierarchical relationships:

Examples:
"Blood", "Sense organs" indicate parts of animals
"Personnel", "Treasuries" indicate parts of organizations

Associative relationship

It is an association between semantically related terms not belonging to the same grouping or in hierarchical relation to each other.

Example:
"Accountants" may be associated with "State Examination for Accountants", or "Studies of Accountants"
not to "Counsel", which is on the same level of hierarchy
not to "Business Consultants", which is less significant.

Synonymous relationship

It is a relation between synonymous or quasi-synonymous terms, of which only one is accepted in the thesaurus and then used as a keyword to express the content of the documents, while the others act as search keys within the thesaurus (marked with an asterisk).

Example:
"Programs for economic development" in ThESS is preferred to "Development aids"
"Development aids" is a useful research key for books that talk about programs for economic development, therefore:
*Development aids
Use : Programs for economic development
Vice versa:
Programs for economic development
Used for : *Development aids

Displaying the thesaurus

The thesaurus of the library is fully accessible using the online library catalogue (Discovery). The terms are displayed in alphabetical order (go to the list). From each term, it is possible to visualize the entire network of relations (hierarchical, associative, synonymical) that binds it to other terms of the thesaurus.

Navigation of the entire thesaurus tree is possible through this display