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Thesaurus Construction and Use: a practical manual, 3rd edition
JEAN AITCHESON, ALAN GILCHRIST and DAVID BAWDEN, 1997 London, ASLIB xvi + 212 pp ISBN 0 85142 390 6
This is the third edition of an established work in its field, first published in 1972. It has now been updated from the edition of 1987 especially to take account of the US ANSI/NISO Z39.19 Thesaurus construction standard (1994) and the emergence of new applications for thesauri within automated information retrieval. The authors acknowledge that developments in full-text retrieval create questions about the need for controlled indexing languages leading some to pronounce `the death of the thesaurus'. However, they argue, convincingly, that this sentence is premature. Many systems both continue to use thesauri for controlled indexing, although, increasingly, they are hidden from the user, and provide for thesaurus-based and free-text searching to co-exist. This edition then aims to continue to provide `an adequate guide to the competent construction of most thesauri' and we are told that each chapter of the previous edition has been revised and, in some instances, substantially rewritten.
Following a brief introduction to this edition, the `still largely accurate' introduction to the second edition is reprinted, although its overview of the contents, confusingly, does not entirely correspond with the updated version. Surely it would not have been too burdensome to provide one comprehensive introduction and avoid this confusion at the...