Pete Dagutis is now in charge of maintenance/changes to the Thesaurus. The Contractor has both an internal team to monitor quality and an external team to assure that user concerns are being addressed.

Where changes have been made (see Open Letters dated November 29, 2004 and December 14, 2004 ; and my remarks at AERA in Montreal) they are not retroactive. Items assigned to an earlier subject heading, e.g. "Blacks" (1977-2003) will not come up in a search of the new subject heading "African Americans" (2004 — ).

Q. There was a posting on the EBSS list about changes to the Thesaurus. Can you explain the nature of those changes?
A. The recent activity was primarily a maintenance effort. There has not been any cleanup or maintenance of the ERIC Thesaurus since the 1980’s. This was a one time cleanup to align the Thesaurus with the terms used today.

Q. Will you publish a new print edition of the Thesaurus?
A. At this time there are no plans to provide the Thesaurus in other than electronic format.

In Fall of 2004 changes were made to the ERIC Thesaurus that had the effect of flattening some of the subject hierarchies. Most of the changes were in subjects that are only peripherally related to education or are related to subjects of instruction within schools.

Some of the changes seemed illogical or illconceived, e.g. "Adverbs use Form Classes Languages" or "Condoms use Sexually Transmitted Diseases."

One aspect of these changes that I found troubling is that they increased the Thesaurus' complexity, and violated its internal logic. Many of the logical errors were corrected by the contractor within 2-3 months. The largest remaining error that I have found is that in the Thesaurus as it displays now, "Blacks" says use "African Americans," but "African Americans" cannot be used because it is listed as being a synonym (see reference) not a descriptor. This has not been fixed in ~4 months.

Detailed descriptions of the EBSS Committee's look at the Thesaurus were in included in Open Letters dated November 29, 2004 and December 14, 2004   In addition, I went into some detail on the Thesaurus in my remarks at AERA in Montreal.

Thesaurus Review
When contacted in fall 2004 about the Thesaurus review and changes that had been made to the Thesaurus, the ERIC office said: "We are not ready to make any major changes in the Thesaurus. Due consideration must be given to how the technology will operate with full text and a variety of other factors." Further research on this topic is reported in the Open Letters.

p. 13 "the contractor shall provide a brief written assessment of the ERIC Thesaurus to determine changes needed to maximize database searching and retrieval by both inexperienced and experienced database users. The assessment shall also consider changes needed to ensure interoperability with other ED information sources..."