The Library of Congress has opened a new site -- http://id.loc.gov -- which will provide access to various vocabularies and standards maintained at LC. This replaces lcsh.info which was on a non-official site and provided access to LCSH is machine-readable formats. Below is the announcement message sent out by Sally McCallum, head of the Network Development and MARC Standards Office.
“The CAB Thesaurus is the essential search tool for all users of the CAB ABSTRACTS™ and Global Health databases and related products. The CAB Thesaurus is not only an invaluable aid for database users but it has many potential uses by individuals and organizations indexing their own information resources for both internal use and on the Internet”. Includes relevant CAS registry numbers for chemicals, and Commission notation for enzymes.
“The ASFA Thesaurus is an indexing and searching tool. It contains the subject descriptors used to index the records which are contained in the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) bibliographic database. ASFA is an abstracting and indexing service covering the world's literature on the science, technology, management, and conservation of marine, brackish water, and freshwater resources and environments, including their socio-economic and legal aspects.”
“The ICPSR Thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary system composed of three separate lists: Subject Thesaurus, Personal Names Authority List, and Geographic Names Thesaurus. Subject Thesaurus is an alphabetical listing of social science subject terms. The scope of this thesaurus is multidisciplinary and is intended to reflect the subject range of the ICPSR archive. Social science disciplines represented include: political science, sociology, history, economics, education, criminal justice, gerontology, demography, public health, law, and international relations.
“The Metathesaurus is a very large, multi-purpose, and multi-lingual vocabulary database that contains information about biomedical and health-related concepts, their various names, and the relationships among them. It is built from the electronic versions of many different thesauri, classifications, code sets, and lists of controlled terms used in patient care, health services billing, public health statistics, indexing and cataloging biomedical literature, and/or basic, clinical, and health services research.
“The Joint Thesaurus contains the controlled terminology for indexing all information within the subject scopes of the International Nuclear Information System (INIS) and the Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDE). The terminology is intended for use in subject descriptions for input or retrieval of information in these systems.”
“The NASA Thesaurus contains the authorized subject terms by which the documents in the NASA Aeronautics and Space Database are indexed and retrieved. The scope of this controlled vocabulary includes not only aerospace engineering, but all supporting areas of engineering and physics, the natural space sciences (astronomy, astrophysics, and planetary science), Earth science, and to some extent, the biological sciences.”
“The Thesaurus provides a broad multidisciplinary subject term vocabulary that aids in information search and retrieval. Subject terms, called Descriptors, are organized into hierarchies, where series of narrower terms are linked to broader terms. After performing a Thesaurus search, a user can insert a Descriptor directly into the Technical Reports Guided Search page.”
