News that a beta version of an online ethnographic thesaurus has gone live arrived in my inbox this morning.  The editorial board of the Ethnographic Thesaurus seeks input on how to make it better:

Friends:

I’m happy to announce that after a three-year development project funded by the Mellon Foundation a draft of the Ethnographic Thesaurus is now available on the website of the American Folklore Society. We are well aware that this version is not perfect, and we need your help to make it better. Please visit the site, try it out, and send us your comments and/or suggestions for added terms. Below is the official announcement from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the American Folklore Society:

Ethnographic Thesaurus Goes Live!

The American Folklore Society is pleased to announce that the Ethnographic Thesaurus is now available in a dynamically-searchable draft version on the Society’s website at: http://et.afsnet.org.

The Ethnographic Thesaurus is a hierarchical listing of subject terms from folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and related fields. The Thesaurus will improve access to cultural materials and scholarship by
affording researchers, archivists, indexers, librarians, and others a common language for description.

During the past three years, The American Folklore Society developed the Thesaurus in cooperation with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, supported by a generous grant from the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The editorial board of the Ethnographic Thesaurus requests your comments on existing thesaurus terms, as well as suggestions for terms to be added in the future.

Suzanne Flandreau (for the ET Editorial Board)