Indexing Guidelines

Thesaurus users should apply the following basic rules of indexing to ensure consistency of subject access to literacy collections in various centres:

Be specific.
Avoid using general descriptors such as "Approaches", "Education", "Literacy", etc. Prefer specific terms such as "Modular approach", "Liberatory education", "Aboriginal language literacy", etc.
Use as many subject descriptors as needed to fully describe the contents of a document.
Thesaurus descriptors are not mutually exclusive. More than one subject descriptor will be needed to describe most documents.
For example, a document describing "a pilot literacy program organized by a library and offered to women only on a part-time basis" will be indexed with the following descriptors:

      Library literacy programs
      Part time literacy programs
      Pilot programs
      Women's literacy
Make use of the semantic structure of the Thesaurus.
Consult the list of broader terms, narrower terms, and related terms attached to each descriptor chosen as an index term. These relationships define the meaning of a descriptor, and they suggest other index terms that may be pertinent.
Use specific identifiers when appropriate.
Identifiers are names of individuals (e.g., "Freire, Paulo"), organizations (e.g., "UNESCO"), or geographic place names (e.g., "New York"). These names are not included in the Thesaurus.