New Tools for astronomy librarians D Donna Thompson SLA PAM Roundtable June 9, 2014

3 things Katie wants us to remember OPEN INTEROPERABLE COMMUNITY SUPPORT Edit and maintain

WHY? Increase findability Use same terminology Community driven

The Structure of the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus Total number of concepts: 1906 | Top-level concepts: 15 | Depth: 12 levels Representation of the top level terms in the UAT and the corresponding number of child level terms.

Browsing the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus Hierarchical Browser This shows the thesaurus terms in context. Clicking on a specific term will bring up information such as broader, narrower, and related terms. You can also see the details for each term, like scope notes and synonyms. Visual Browser The relationships between words in the UAT are laid out in an easy to visualize manner. Clicking a term will either expand or collapse its child terms, allowing you to drill down through the thesaurus and explore the relationships between terms.

Proposed Thesaurus Management Tool: VocBench VocBench is a software platform that we are currently exploring for thesaurus management. Through this tool, users suggest changes to the UAT, which are then reviewed and discussed by a team of editors. The editors approve or reject each suggestion, and approved changes are released by the stewarding librarian as new versions of the thesaurus. This platform also captures a detailed history of changes and updates, maintaining the provenance of each term individually and the thesaurus as a whole.

ADS and the UAT The thesaurus will support a number of use cases for the ADS: – Provide a consistent concept space to support document classification and indexing – Enhanced search via semantic query expansion – Faceted filtering and browsing of documents and datasets

ADS 2.0

Tour this Page

Word Cloud from LISA abstracts

Author Network from LISA proceedings

THANK YOU! Donna Thompson