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Classification and Indexing Section

Working Group on
Multilingual Thesauri

Invitation to participate:
World-Wide Review of IFLA
Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri

Comments deadline: July 31, 2005


PDF Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri

The IFLA Working Group on Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri started to prepare this document in 2002. The objective of this document is to add to the existing Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri as worded in the ISO-standard for multi-lingual thesauri (ISO-5964-1985) or in handbooks on thesaurus building, such as Aitchison (2000). The general principles for the building of monolingual thesauri are assumed.

There are three approaches in the development of multilingual thesauri:

1. building a new thesaurus from the bottom up
  1. starting with one language and adding another language or languages
  2. starting with more than one language simultaneously
2. combining existing thesauri
  1. merging two or more existing thesauri into one new (multilingual) information retrieval language to be used in indexing and retrieval
  2. linking existing thesauri and subject heading languages to each other; using the existing thesauri and/or subject heading languages both in indexing and retrieval
3. translating a thesaurus into one or more other languages.

This document focused on the first two approaches.

The document is presented as a draft for world-wide review. Comments on this draft Guidelines for Mulilingual Thesauri are now being sought. The Working Group would also very much appreciate contributions of multilingual examples. Examples for non-symmetrical thesaurus for consideration of inclusion in Appendix A would also be most welcome as would be comments on the examples that are provided throughout the document.

Please submit your comments by 31st July 2005 to:

Dr. Gerhard J.A. Riesthuis Chair, Working Group on Multilingual Thesauri University of Amsterdam Turfdraagsterpad 9 NL-1012 XT Amsterdam, The Netherland The Netherlands

Dr. Marcia L. Zeng
Chair, IFLA Classification and Indexing Section
Kent State University
School of Library and Information Science
Kent, OH 44242-0001, USA