On 15 November 2022, students in the Fall 2022 LIS9202: “Thesaurus Construction & Metadata” course (at FIMS, Western University, London Canada) participated in informal presentations of their term-long team work. The workshop included round table discussions of teams paired up by their topic themes or thesaurus implementation nuances. This term’s topics included wine culture and taking care of domestic animals, stage musicals and horror films, divination and cryptozoology, political propaganda and true crime.

Students shared improvised visualizations of the taxonomies and explained the logic behind their decisions within the controlled vocabulary choices.

There was time to move around the classroom to have one-on-one conversations and shared their resulting hierarchies and talked about how they overcame some of the challenges in the thesaurus construction process.

Overall, the Workshop was a success! We worked to summarize lessons learned in the process of working with subject-related metadata to create a controlled vocabulary system. Later in the term, students experimented with encoding their thesauri in the XML format.

*Disclaimer: everyone in the classroom is masked due to the COVID19 health guidelines at Western in the Fall 2022 term.