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The ILO Thesaurus is used primarily for the content analysis of material selected for
inclusion in Labordoc.
Familiarity with the ILO Thesaurus makes it easier to find material in Labordoc
on a specific subject.
The ILO Thesaurus is also used by other departments in the ILO for indexing
and retrieving their own specific or local material. Staff of the
International Labour Standards Department use it to summarize the
contents of major labour legislation included in their database NATLEX.
A number of specialized libraries in ILO partner institutions - governments,
employers' organizations, trade unions - use the ILO Thesaurus as a tool
for indexing and retrieval. As well, several ILO field offices use the facet numbers in the ILO Thesaurus to
arrange their collections. Editors and translators also use the ILO Thesaurus
as a specialized glossary.
Why is a thesaurus necessary?
There are often many different ways of expressing a single concept. Even
country names can be expressed in different ways: for example, the
Netherlands and Holland. The task is even more complicated when searching for material in
more than one language. The thesaurus specifies which term will be used as the preferred term for a particular
concept and then connects the non-preferred terms or synonyms to it. It does
the work of remembering the synonyms, so that indexers
and information seekers can speak a common language.
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