ABSTRACT
The thesaurus within the context of information retrieval was developed approximately 50 years ago in an environment quite different from the one we find ourselves in today. While paper-based formats like printed books and printed serials remain, new formats continue not only to emerge but to proliferate. A recent OCLC report tells us that annual production projections for digital materials by the year 2007 are too large to estimate. 1 Beyond the challenge of new formats and the quantities and interrelationships of those formats, additional layers of complexity are added as national libraries, bibliographic utilities, and other private and governmental entities work toward bilingual and multilingual subject access within and across online collections and catalogs. Despite all that distances us from 50 years ago, there is this commonality: an interest in thesauri. There is an unprecedented interest in thesauri and related types of vocabulary switching tools not just within the library community but also from the business community, information architects, and linguists. For instance, Rosenfeld and Morville in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web predict that “thesauri [will] become a key tool for dealing with the growing size and importance of web sites and intranets.” 2
