DEVELOPMENT OF A THESAURUS OF PLACE NAMES FOR THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY LIBRARY BY CATHERINE A. HAMMOND, B.Sc. A Master's Dissertation, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the award of the Master of Science degree of the Loughborough University of Technology September 1994 Supervisor: I.A. Smith, BA, MA. Department of Information and Library Studies @ C. Hammond, 1994. ABSTRACT The purpose of this project was to design and construct a thesaurus of place names for the Royal Geographical Society Library; to be used in conjunction wi~h the cataloguing module of its automated system. The Royal Geographical Society was founded in 1830 to promote geography and exploration. Its library includes over 145,000 volumes as well as 800 current periodicals covering geography, travel and exploration and is used by members of expeditions; academics; students and other researchers. An analysis of the library's collection, users and management was used as the basis for thesaurus design. The characteristics of the controlled indexing language and the construction techniques used are discussed and recommendations for maintenance and future thesaurus 'development are made. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor Inese Smith for her advice and enthusiasm; Jayne Dunlop, Librarian at the Royal Geographical Society for all her help and, in particular, my parents and Richard for their support and encouragement over the last six months. ABSTRACT ACKNOWLEGEMENTS CONTENTS PAGE NO. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Aims and objectives 1 1.2 Background 1 1.3 Methodology 2 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Development of ideas about thesauri, 4 their design and use 2.1.1 Thesauri 4 2.1.2 The use and effectiveness of 5 thesauri in postcoordinate systems 2.2 Thesaurus construction and development 8 2.3 Geographical names in published thesauri 8 CHAPTER 3 THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY AND ITS LIBRARY 3.1 The history of the Society 12 3.2 The development of the Society's library 18 3.3 The Society's other collections 20 3.3.1 The Map Room 20 3.3.2 The Picture Library 21 3.3.3 The Archives 21 3.4 The Library: its collection, users and 22 management 3.4.1 The collection 22 3.4.2 Library users 22 3.4.3 Acquisitions 23 3.4.4 Cataloguing 23 3.4.5 Arrangement of stock 24 3.4.6 Circulation 25 3.4.7 Staffing 26 3.5 The Library: automation of library 26 management systems CHAPTER 4 THESAURUS DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION 4.1 Type of thesaurus required 29 4. 1 • 1 Nature of the information 31 system 4.1.1.1 Subject field 31 4.1.1.2 Type of literature 32 4.1.1.3 Quantity of literature 32 4.1.1.4 System users 33 4.1.1.5 Questions to be put to 33 the system 4.1.1.6 Resources available 34 4.1 .2 Characteristics of the indexing 35 language 4.1.2.1 Recall devices 36 4.1.2.2 Precision devices 38 4.2 Construction techniques 40 4.2.1 Sources of terms 40 4.2.2 Making an outline of the subject 42 field 4.2.3 Selection and recording of terms 45 from published sources 4.2.3.1 Names of administrative areas 46 4.2.3.2 Names of major settlements 47 and physical features 4.2.4 Selecting terms from the library 48 catalogue 4.2.5 Checking term form and relation­ 49 ships 4.2.6 Final form and use of the 49 structured term list CHAPTER 5 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TESTING, MAINTENANCE AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENT 5.1 Testing 53 5.2 Maintenance 54 5.2.1 Adding new terms 55 5.2.2 Deleting terms 55 5.2.3. Amending terms 56 5.2.4 Managing thesaurus maintenance 56 5.3 Future thesaurus construction 57 BIBLIOGRAPHY 60 APPENDIX 1. Thesaurus of place names 1.0 INTRODUCTION 1.1 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The aims of this project were to design and construct a thesaurus of geographical names for the Royal Geographical Society library and to offer recommendations for future thesaurus construction. The objectives were: to become familiar with the collection, the users and management of the library; - to decide which would be the most appropriate type of thesaurus for this information system; - to compile a structured term list from which an alphabetical display could be generated; to provide recommendations about future construction, testing and maintenance. 1.2 BACKGROUND This project was carried out at the request of the Royal Geographical Society who wish to compile a thesaurus of geographical terms to be used in conjunction with the cataloguing module of the library's automated system. 1 The latter is expected to become operational towards the end of 1994. The library has two subject catalogues: in one, works are filed under geographical names (e. g. continents, countries etc.), in the other, filing is under different aspects of geography as a discipline (e.g.human geography, physical geography etc.). It is intended that each of these parts will eventually have a corresponding thesaurus, with work to start on that of geographical names. 1.3 METHODOLOGY The thesaurus construction process began wi th preliminary visits to the library in order to become familiar with the collection and its management. As only six to eight weeks was available for construction, it was decided that a relatively small geographical area would be covered - Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Once the information system had been studied in detail and the design of the thesaurus determined, compilation work began. The first stage was to define the subject field in detail using subject headings from the library catalogue and general geographical reference works. When this was accomplished, the selection of more specific terms from published sources and from catalogue entries began. 2 The library staff's knowledge of user enquiries provided essential guidance at this stage. Terms for each country were collected in turn. Where the relationship between new and existing terms was obvious, the new terms were added to the basic structure immediately. Terms whose status required verification were not admitted until this had been done. The practical part of the project took approximately 120 hours to complete over a seven week period in May and June 1994. Three days of each week were spent at the Society's library using the sources previously mentioned. The result is a structured list of 1070 terms, from which an alphabetical display can be created using the library's Cairs cataloguing module. The work was carried out in accordance with the Bri tish Standard Guide to establishment and development of monolingual thesauri: BS5723(1) and drawing on the literature of this field, which is the subject of the next chapter. REFERENCES 1. BRITISH STANDARDS INSTITUTION. British Standard Guide to establishment and development of monolingual thesauri. 2nd ed., 1987. 3 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS ABOUT THESAURI, THEIR DESIGN AND USE 2.1.1 Thesauri The use of the word thesaurus is traced by Gilchrist from its first recorded use in 1736, when its meaning was 'a treasury or storehouse of knowledge, as a dictionary, encylopaedia or the like', to possibly its first use in an information retrieval context in 1957(1). Roget's Thesaurus of English words and Phrases, first published in 1852, has led to the now popular understanding of the word as referring to a dictionary of synonyms, or more correctly quasi-synonyms, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary's definition, 'a collection of concepts or words arranged according to sense' ( 2 ) . The thesaurus in information retrieval has been defined as,. The vocabulary of a controlled indexing language, formally organised so that the a priori relationships between concepts (for example as 'broader' and 'narrower') are made explicit (3) and as, 4 ... an authority list showing terms which may, and sometimes may not, be used in an index to describe concepts. Each term is usually given together with terms which are related to it in one of a number of ways(4). Thesauri were first used for this purpose in the late 1950s, in conjunction with the earliest postcoordinate indexing systems which required simple terms with low precoordination not available in the indexing languages of the time. Since then, the' value of controlled indexing languages has been called into question and although still widely used, their role in information retrieval has changed and looks set to be modified further in the future. 2.1 .2 The use and effectiveness of thesauri in postcoordinate systems : the natural vs. controlled language debate Natural language indexing and searching was regarded more favourably than the use of controlled language between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s for two reasons. The first was the creation of large textual databases. These could be searched at speed using any term or combination of terms from the text of the document, making possible for the first time natural language searching. 5 The second is related to the results of tests carried out on indexing systems at Cranfield College in the 1960s(5), which seemed to indicate that natural language was more effective than a controlled vocabulary in information retrieval from postcoordinate systems. Al though the resul ts of the Cranfield experiments were disputed on the grounds that they were poorly devised and did not reflect reality, many accepted them. Database producers felt justified in not spending money on indexing and the construction of controlled languages, and as a result, databases could be made available for public online searching with relatively little effort and their numbers grew rapidly in the 1970s.