The thesaurus of the Hungarian National Library and the public libraries. History and maintenance

Ungváry Rudolf <rudi@oszk.hu>

OSZK

The idea of an overall and universal Thesaurus was already raised in the eighties. At the end of 2000 the completion of it is to be thanked to the coincidence of several circumstances: in Hungary in the last decades more than 50 thesaurus were produced and part of them are available on magnetic tape as well; a user friendly thesaurus editing program system was available; several public libraries provided assistance in structuring of the lexical stock and in the finalisation of the user assistance guide books. The present study discusses the relationship of the detailed Thesaurus and the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), and the structure of the thesaurus. USMARC and US MARC CLASSIFICATION exchange format is used by the controlling system of the thesaurus. The study discusses the graphic display of the co-operative maintenance in detail. The thesaurus is widely used in the National Library and in public libraries; it is to be expected that in the near future it will also be used in other institutions in smaller or larger scale.