HILT: High-Level Thesaurus Project

Overview

HILT - High-Level Thesaurus was a one year project jointly funded by the RSLP and JISC. Its aim was to study and report on the problem of cross-searching and browsing by subject across a wide range of communities, services, and service or resource types in the UK, including: Libraries, museums, archives, electronic services, the DNR, clumps, the DNER, the RDN, bibliographic databases, numeric databases.

The principle project aims were to:

• Thoroughly research the problem, analyse and document its exact nature in detail, focusing on UK requirements across the various communities, services and initiatives, but setting the study firmly in the context of international requirements and standards.

• Analyse the data obtained, and discuss the results with the various communities with an aim to reaching a consensus within the project on how best to apply the findings in relation to existing or new subject schemes and thesauri.

• Attempt to reach a similar consensus within the group of stakeholders generally, both at a workshop and through other methods.

• Contribute to and co-operate with an external evaluation of the project.

• Make a final report and recommendations to RSLP, JISC and various stakeholders, and the national and international community generally.

Progress against deliverables

These aims were met in full, although completion of the final report and the evaluator’s report ran two months beyond the planned schedule. The primary reason for this was the scheduling difficulties inevitably incurred in a project where reaching and maintaining a consensus amongst stakeholders required wide consultation at a number of project points.

The project found that:

• Many different subject schemes and practices are in use in UK services who believe that subject searching across their services is of value both to their users and their staff

• A significant number of UK stakeholders need a quick solution to an immediate problem, indicating a requirement for a rapid response

• There is a strong consensus across the Archives, Electronic Services, Library, and Museums communities in favour of a more practically focused follow-up pilot project that would develop, and accurately determine the full costs and benefits of, a networked, user and machine responsive, interactive route map to the terminologies used by these communities and the relationships between these terminologies. This outcome echoes the project’s own findings that a pilot project of this type is both the response that comes closest to tackling the various facets of the problem identified as relevant to the issue and the best logical and scientific response to the situation identified by the research process (see next bullet point). The importance of this consensus, and of the need to maintain it, should not be underestimated if interoperability is to be achieved and sustained.

• Further research is required into the effectiveness, level and nature of user need, practicality, design requirements, and costs against benefits of such a service before a long term commitment to a possibly expensive service could be justified.

A full report on the project, project outcomes, and project recommendations was sent to RSLP at the end of 2001. It is also available on the HILT web-site at this URL: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/Reports/FinalReport.html

HILT has recently been informed that the proposed follow up project will be funded by JISC as a DNER pilot.

Project Partners

• Centre for Digital Library Research

• Museum Documentation Association (MDA)

• National Council on Archives

• Naitonal Grid for Learning

• Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)

• Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC)

• Scottish University for Industry (SUfI)

• UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)

Contact Details

Project website

http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/

Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 2 July 2002