[Sigia-l] pre-written controlled vocabs?

[Stephanie A. Heacox]

Although I haven't been in the library world for a long time, I once had
intimate knowledge of both the MeSH and ERIC thesauri, and you certainly
couldn't do any better in choice of controlled vocabularies.  In fact, I
wouldn't be surprised if they were *too* thorough for many purposes.

Because both of them are produced by the Federal government, copyright and
licensing are interesting questions.  At first glance, it looks as though
you can re-use MeSH within certain broad guidelines, contained here:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/termscon.html.  Interestingly, though, I don't
recall seeing anyone else but Medline use this thesaurus (but as I said, I'm
long out of the library loop).

ERIC is more interesting - they only seem to talk (on their site) about
licensing or fees in terms of the database itself, not just the thesaurus.
Looks like a phone call or email is in order.  I think this is the office
you need to contact about licensing, but the site link they show doesn't
seem to be working:  http://www.eric.ed.gov/sites/barak.html#fac

Good luck - would you post the results of your discussions?  I have
occasional need for externally-produced thesauri and would love to know the
answer to these questions for future reference.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stephanie A. Heacox
Director of Information Architecture
Orbis2 Partners, LLC
stephanie.heacox at orbis-2.com
direct (718)436-2505
cell (917)797-0719
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org]  On Behalf Of
karl fast
Sent:	Thursday, July 04, 2002 6:56 AM
To:	sigia
Subject:	Re: [Sigia-l] pre-written controlled vocabs?


> A shot in the dark: Dialog has a database called ERIC, especially for
> Education. Don't know if they sell the ERIC *thesaurus* or not.

The ERIC thesaurus is not from DIALOG, it's from...well, ERIC--the
Educationl Resources Information Center. DIALOG simply licenses the
ERIC database (along with bazillion others).

ERIC provides search/browse access to the thesaurus online, and I
know that you can buy a printed copy. I would assume you can get an
electronic version but I dunno if it's free or not.

  http://www.askeric.org/


I think that each of these major thesauri is available from
individual vendors. The INSPEC thesaurus (which covers physics,
electronics, computers and IT) is available from IEE in both printed
and electronic forms.

  http://www.iee.org/publish/support/inspec/document/thes/

For medical, you probably want MESH (download electronic or order
printed version)

  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html


Someone who knows more about commercially available thesauri can
correct me on this.


--karl

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