I will be analyzing the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Thesaurus. This controlled vocabulary was first released in English in 1977 with a substantial revision in 1995, and it has been translated into four other languages: French, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], n.d.-a). It is maintained by UNESCO, but I am not able to find any information on an editorial board. Users can submit a feedback form with suggestions, although UNESCO has not released any information on how these suggestions are evaluated. The UNESCO Thesaurus is “mainly used for indexing and searching resources” in the UNESCO Digital Library, and due to the organization’s scope, these resources fall within the fields of “education, culture, natural sciences, social and human sciences, communication and information” (UNESCO, n.d.-a). The UNESCO Digital Library includes over 350,000 documents that were “either produced by UNESCO or pertain to UNESCO’s fields of competence” (UNESCO, n.d.). After searching through the library, it seems that the majority of these documents are authored by UNESCO. For example, users can read conference documents, such as the draft resolution regarding UNESCO action in Ukraine (UNESCO, 2023), and speeches, such as the Director-General’s address on World Arabic Language Day (Azoulay, 2023).

This is a hierarchical thesaurus that starts with 7 groups: (1) Education, (2) Science, (3) Culture, (4) Social and human sciences, (5) Information and communication, (6) Politics, law, and economics, and (7) Countries and country groupings (UNESCO, n.d.-b). Due to the breadth of these groupings, I will be focusing on the subcategory of (5.05) Information sciences within (5) Information and communication.

I first noticed the high variation of terms found under information sciences. Alongside archive and library science, you also find the terms ISBN and Printing paper (UNESCO, n.d.-a). Interestingly, the system seems to believe that all information is listed under the information sciences, as the following categories also call this one its parent: cultural information, educational information, scientific information, and political information. My first assumption would be that these terms are located under their respective subjects (i.e. cultural information in culture) rather than information science. Interestingly, when I search the UNESCO library for political information, only three resources appear to use this term. One is a newspaper article (Sebenta National Institute for Adult Literacy and Community Development, 1982), and another is an online source for continuous statistics on political, economic and business developments in nearly 200 countries (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2023). I would suspect that there are other, similar resources within UNESCO's vast collection, and since they are not identified via the political information term, I wonder if the UNESCO thesaurus is being consistently utilized.

Narrower terms to information sciences include archive science, library science, and documentation—with the last being the most surprising. I have not heard of documentation as an accepted field of study within the information sciences. The scope note for documentation is the “continuous and systematic processing of documents or data for specialized information users” (UNESCO, n.d.-b). It’s unclear to me how this differs from archival or library science.

I think this thesaurus is successful overall, likely due to the limited way in which it’s being used. I am only aware of its implementation in the UNESCO Digital Library, which allows it to ignore terms that would otherwise be necessary. For example, were this to be implemented as a thesaurus for a wider database of information science scholarship, distinguishing between types of librarianship (e.g. academic vs. public) beyond comparative librarianship would be very useful. The thesaurus also links to the UNESCO Digital Library from each term page, so a user could look through the thesaurus, find an applicable term like “education information,” and then click on “search in UNESDOC” (UNESCO, n.d.-b).