Design of thesauri as a didactic strategy to strengthen comprehension

Abstract

Within libraries and other information units, Knowledge Organization (KO) is a central axis of the processes. In order to carry out an efficient KO, various Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) are used, including thesauri. Several international standards regulate the design and construction of thesauri. This article analyzes the design and development of thesauri by students of librarianship from a higher education college, taking the guidelines published in ISO 25964 as a reference. After this activity was completed, qualitative and quantitative aspects of the product developed were analyzed, namely: the topics of the thesauri developed, the use of descriptors, non-descriptors and identifiers, the presence of equivalent, hierarchical and associative relationships between the terms and the use of typographical variants, abbreviations, qualifiers and scope notes. Designed to strengthen understanding of its structure and use, this activity was developed over a period of six weeks and in virtual and remote mode. The activity showed a deficient appropriation of the concepts related to the input vocabulary of a thesaurus and equivalence relations. The importance of domain topic knowledge on the part of those performing this task was demonstrated as a factor that ensures the effective development of the work. The activity is highly recommended in the subjects who deal with documentary analysis activities in librarianship courses of study.