Building a thesaurus for a collection of cartoon drawings

摘要

The University of Kent has a large collection of original cartoon drawings that is used as a research resource and is also consulted as a picture library. The collection has been extensively catalogued by subject, but the subject keywords are organised for the original card catalogue rather than the present day online retrieval system. This paper describes a project set up to build a thesaurus based on the 15,000 existing subject terms and then convert the existing cataloguing to the new thesaurus terms. This is a non-trivial project that has been made much easier by the creation of a special-purpose graphical thesaurus editor.