Implementing a new thesaurus on the King’s Fund Unicorn system

or

Eureka! The best ideas happen in the bath…

Liz JamesLiz James EUUG Conference, Paris EUUG Conference, Paris 20022002

Background

Unicorn implemented in 1990 (no previous online LMS)

King’s Fund collects health and social care managementmanagement material – not clinical information

No suitable tool for subject indexing, not even DH-DSS Data

Why not MeSH or LCSH?

Too clinical (MeSH)

Too broad-based (LCSH)

Management terms in both are under-

developed for our purposes

Both too American!

What next?

Two senior librarians nominated to compile a health & social care management thesaurus

This can be used in-house and sold to income generate

Work takes about 2 years However,

the product is useless…the product is useless…

And then…?The Kings Fund is part of a consortium:

HMICHMIC

HHealth Careealth Care MManagementanagement IInformationnformation

CConsortiumonsortium

Other partners:

UK Department of HealthNuffield Institute for Health (Leeds

University)

At last!

The DoH puts up money to update the

existing DH-DSS Data thesaurus

An experienced librarian is appointed

(Phil Defriez – lovely boy! )

KF staff assist Phil (remotely)

HMIC thesaurus is finallyfinally published in

2001

How to get the thesaurus on

Unicorn? The original KF thesaurus had been keyed

into Unicorn by a temp – it took months!

No budget – KF didn’t have the money to

pay for it this time

Time factor – the project had been

running for years. It was high timehigh time the

thesaurus was implemented

In the bath one day (honest!),I had a brilliant idea...

My brilliant idea I had a Word file of the thesaurus (total

of 377 pages – 10784 + terms) If I could do a search and replace on the

relationship terms (BT/NT/RT) and turn them into MARC fields, we could load the file onto Unicorn!!

Will it work?

I called Sirsi (of course!)(of course!)

Each individual authority record needs to be

formatted according to a template

If I can do this, the file can be saved in text format

This can be uploaded to our server

The template

*** DOCUMENT BOUNDARY ***

FORM=SUBJECT

150. 0|aPreferred term

410. 0|aNon-preferred/improper term

500. 0|aBroader term

510. 0|aNarrower term

550. 0|aRelated term

680. 0|aScope note

This is going to be easy...

Now it’s just a simple matter of search and replace!

Did I say simplesimple?

Not so easy...

The Word file has ditto marks where there are more than one BT/NT/RT in a record!!!

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMSBT Information systems

NT Cataloguing systems

.. Classification systems

.. Indexing systems

RT Information management

Is this the end of my brilliant idea?

An agonised phone call to Phil:Would it be possible to give me a Word document of the file where each BT/NT/RT was repeated?

YESYES!!

Phew!

Next problem...

In the printed thesaurus, all terms (proper and improper) are listed in the A-Z sequence

BUTIn the Unicorn authority module, only proper terms have their own entries

Solution?

All the improper term entries have to be stripped out manually, e.g.

Mental handicapUSE Learning disabilities

The next problem?

Pre-coordinated terms from the old thesaurus which had been post-coordinated in the new had to be stripped out manually, e.g.

Nurses roleUSE Nurses [AND] Professional roleFinding them was easy…

Surely that’s it?

Unfortunately not! Many improper terms have the same words as the proper terms they refer to:

RESEARCH SAMPLINGUF Sampling in research .. Sampling [research]

Now?!

Still not… Some improper terms have been used as part of proper terms:

Advisers [consultants] USE ConsultantsAdvisers [counsellors] USE Counsellors There is also a proper term

Medical advisers

Almost there...

But not quite! Many terms contained the word “and” - this needed to be changed to & so the Boolean operator AND will work properly

Caveat…

As long as you remember not to replace just the string ‘and’‘and’ alone OR

Manual handling becomes…

At last!! The editing was finished The file was saved in text format and

emailed to Sirsi The old authority module was deleted The file was loaded onto our backup

server for testing…

Fingers crossed!Fingers crossed!

First problem Some of the records had “collided” Only proper terms were coming up

in the BROWSE AUTHORITYBROWSE AUTHORITY listing - no sign of any improper terms…

A quick phone call to Barbara and a little tweaking of Format Manager and...

Well…??

Finally!

The text file was loaded onto our main server

The rebuild authority reports were run and…

However...

That’s not the end of the story.

The next issue is:

How to maintain the How to maintain the thesaurus?thesaurus?

Thesaurus maintenance 1

We have a spreadsheet on a shared drive, accessible to all those indexing

We add new terms, disputed existing terms or terms that don’t work as we find them

This is sent to Phil (love ‘im) to decide which terms will be added and to establish the relationships (no hard work for us!)

Thesaurus maintenance 2

We add any new terms to the authority module as PROVISIONAL terms

If possible, we retrospectively index any old records

The globaledit report has been working overtime at the King’s Fund!

Thesaurus maintenance 3

Get the new terms Upgrade the PROVISIONAL terms to

AUTHORISED Edit the relationship terms Run the unauthlst report once a month Check all the unauthorised terms listed

The future? (Aaah, aargh and

phew)

The HMIC thesaurus is going to die (aaah)

We will be using the bigger DH Thesaurus at some point soon (aargh)

At least I know how to do it now (phew)

PIECE OF CAKE!PIECE OF CAKE!

For further informationContact me at the Fund:

Liz JamesKing’s Fund11/13 Cavendish SquareLondon W1G 0AN

ljames@kingsfund.org.ukTel: 020-7307 2559