AAT\GCI thesaurus

    **** Moderator's comments:   It occurred to me that some of you might
    not be familiar with the AAT and the Conservation Thesaurus so I
    asked Colleen to fill us in

The Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) is an operating unit within the
Art History Information Program of the J. Paul Getty Trust.  Its mandate
is to develops a standardized vocabulary of art and architecture terms
for use in the documentation of object collections, as well as for use
in bibliographic and visual databases.  Vocabulary control is central to
the building of such databases, and while libraries have routinely
applied such control to the cataloging of their collections, the
widespread use of computerization in archival, museum, and visual
resource collections has made the need for authority control more
urgent.

The Conservation Thesaurus Project is a collaborative venture  between
the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and AAT.  This interdisciplinary
venture has a two-fold mandate to develop a controlled vocabulary for
the field of Conservation, as well as to fold that vocabulary into the
AAT.

The catalyst driving this joint project was the combined need of GCI's
Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts (AATA) for a controlled
vocabulary for subject indexing and the opportunity this would provide
the AAT to expand its focus to include the perspective of conservation.
This joint project will produce a separate Conservation Terminology List
which will appear as an alphabetical report of terms needed for
conservation, based on AATA's keyword list of terms needed for their
subject index.  The terminology will also be incorporated into the AAT,
and will become an integral part of its second edition.

For more information contact Colleen Heslip, Research Coordinator,
Conservation Thesaurus Project, AAT, 62 Stratton Road, Williamstown, MA
01267, phone 413-458-9173, fax, 413-458-3757, email bm.cxh@rlg

                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 5:54
                    Distributed: Sunday, May 3, 1992
                        Message Id: cdl-5-54-003
                                  ***