English Heritage, the UK government body "responsible for advice and conservation of the historic environment in England," has recently developed a set of seven new thesauri to assist standardization of terms when creating records of the past. New users are first guided to an introduction to thesauri as indexing tools and then to the contents page, which offers access to the seven thesauri: Monument Types, Archaeological Objects, Building Materials, Defence of Britain, Maritime Place Names, Maritime Craft Type, and Maritime Cargo. Within each thesaurus, entries can be displayed by class or alphabetically. The entry for each term usually includes a definition, what it can be used for, a class name, related terms, and in some cases, broader or narrower terms. Directions for use and a key to abbreviations are available at each thesaurus page. The site also includes a comments page where users can submit candidate terms, but this was inoperable at time of review. Although the site is probably most useful to those involved in historic conservation in the UK, it should also appeal to other users in related fields as well as thesaurus enthusiasts the world over.
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