The thesaurus challenge: creating a useful thesaurus isn't for the unschooled or the faint of heart. Non-believers should try to find something on You Tube, where amateurs tag the videos

Information Outlook, March, 2008 by Cybele Elaine Werts

This article is about onomasticons, or perhaps onomasticonography. Wait! Don't check the cover to see if you've picked up the wrong magazine. You probably know these things by their more general name, "thesauri," without which you wouldn't be able to find half of what you look for.

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Think of thesaurus as a category.

An onomasticon, on the other hand, is a collection of specialized terms related to a specific field, one kind of thesaurus.

The term thesaurus is broad enough to encompass onomasticons. But the term onomasticons is not broad enough to include other kinds of thesauri. Onomasticon doesn't even have its own entry in Thesaurus.com

And that illustrates one of the challenges with a specialized thesaurus, or at least with creating one. Do you go from the general to the particular or from the particular to the general--and how do you keep the users on track?

Daphne Worsham, the assistant director and information services coordinator of the Western Regional Resources Center in Eugene, Oregon, helped create that organization's special education thesaurus. Worsham has been an information professional for 10 years and managed the thesaurus for eight.

Regular Information Outlook contributor Cybele Elaine Werts recently spoke with her about the challenges and rewards of creating the best list for the job.

Their conversation ranged from understanding how words are used to tagging YouTube videos and other user-generated content.

Werts: Before we get started on the thesaurus topics, perhaps you could tell me a little bit about the information services part of your job. And about what we do as a regional resource center focused on special education.

Worsham: The six regional centers are funded by the Federal Office of Special Education Programs, lovingly known as OSEP, to support state offices in special education as they try to comply with the federal law, IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Werts: State officers of special education, for people who are unfamiliar with that, that would be like departments of education in each state but for special education.

Worsham: Yes, they are generally a subdivision of that larger department of education. And we provide what's called technical assistance. That can be any number of things, from assisting with data analysis, with professional development, with--and this would be in my department--providing research on professional development models, teaching strategies, just a wide variety of issues that the states encounter as they try to improve the outcomes for children.

Most of what I do is in the office, although my coworkers go out into the field and work in the different states that we serve. As I mentioned, I do specifically research on whatever it is a state is needing; I maintain Web sites; I write reports; and I manage a small collection of in-house documents, a much larger world of electronic documents. And so, part of the time, I'm sort of a reference librarian, and at other times, to be honest, I feel like a switchboard operator for connecting people to one resource or another.

We serve Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada and Hawaii, as well as the Pacific entities.

Werts: I'm thinking that not everyone reading Information Outlook necessarily uses a thesaurus, other than Roget's Thesaurus, of course, so they might not be too clear on what we are talking about here. Can you explain why areas of specialty, like ours, in special education, would need such a thing?

Worsham: First off, it is a controlled language, as I just said, and I think, in any very focused subject area, you need that, because researchers all develop their own ideas of what things mean. There are regional differences. Just to give a common example of a regional difference, I learned when I worked in a restaurant, that if you order a regular coffee in certain parts of the country, that automatically means to put cream in it. If you order a regular coffee on the West Coast, it means black. So if we use "regular" to tag something as an identifier, it wouldn't mean the same thing to everyone.

Early on, we learned that we have to be really clear in our language if we're defining things. And the current work that is being done by Dr. Dean Fixsen [of the National Implementation Research Network] and his work on implementation are very important, right up in the front of any improvement activity, to have an agreement on definitions in common language. So, as the education systems are looking more and more at scientifically based improvement strategies, that clarity of language is becoming more and more important, even right down to the school level.

Werts: When you say a "controlled language," what do you mean exactly by that?

Worsham: "Controlled language" simply means that we reference this list of terms whenever we define items that are being entered into a system. And we use that same list of definitions, defined words or definitions, when we go to search that system, so that we don't end up with a lot of results that really aren't relevant for what we are looking for.