Thesaurus of Graphic Materials 1, 2, & 3

The image to the right is a screenshot of a partially expanded, but truncated (“A” to “D”), hierarchy of the first (of 26) main subdivisions of the Thesaurus of Graphic Materials (TGM), a controlled vocabulary for “indexing visual materials by subject and by genre/format.”‘   The subdivision is entitled  ” Subject Terms Activities”.  The image shows only the portion between  A to the very beginning of D.  This screenshot is not from official site of The Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM), which is maintained under the aegis of the Library of Congress, as one might expect, because that version is  user unfriendly in the extreme. Rather it is from a free vocabulary site, TemaTres Vocabulary Server which is much easier to navigate.  That’s why it’s here, to give a meaningful sense of the TGM’s scope and contents.

As described on the official site:

“The Thesaurus for Graphic Materials is a tool for indexing visual materials by subject and by genre/format. The thesaurus includes more than 7,000 subject terms and 650 genre/format terms to index types of photographs, prints, design drawings, ephemera, and other pictures. In 2007, the subject and genre/format vocabularies, previously maintained separately, were merged into a single list and migrated to new software, MultiTes.  Other minor changes are clarified in the links below. For questions about the thesaurus, contact TGM editors at: tgmed@loc.gov.”

In the overview of the TGM in the Tematres site the TGM is said to contain 11,893 terms, 13,262 relations between terms, and 5,230 non-preferred terms.

The merger of the subject and genre/format terms in a single thesaurus simplifies things in some respects but    it leads to some confusion about these areas, which are really distinct.  It is worth noting that the genre/format term list can still be downloaded separately, but the subject terms cannot.  The logic of this choice evades me.  While a single list may be beneficial for site users in searching the LC assets, there appears no reason (except possibly for some additional maintenance work) not to also keep each list available separately.

The official TGM  site, however, contains only a blind search function for the new combined TGM, on the one hand, or the ability to download either a text of an XML file of original TGM1: Subject Terms (which it what I’m really interested in here) or TGM2: Genre/Format Terms. It isn’t clear at the present whether the downloadable files will eventually reflect the merger of the two lists or not.

While blind search boxes have their place I think they should always be accompanied by a complete list of terms which allow the hierarchy to be navigated.  The lack of such a tool on the official site it frustrating.  But gratefully there is an alternative.

At TemaTres Vocabulary Server one can find both TGM1 and TGM2 in both a purely alphabetic listing or in an expandable hierarchical list.  Each of these options allows for a much more satisfying and thorough search of terms in its own way.  I discovered this source only after reaching my frustration level while trying to strip everything but the alphabetic terms from the XML, in preparation for a comparison of the TGM1 with other subject vocabularies.  Thank goodness!

Here is a A list of the highest level categories of the TGM1, as set forth on the TemaTres site.

• Activities
• Audiovisual materials
• Behavior
• Body parts
• Children playing adults
• Concepts
• Economic & social conditions
• Insignia
• Materials
• Mental states
• Natural phenomena
• Objects
• Organisms
• Patterns (Design elements)
• People
• Periodicals
• Physical characteristics
• Physical geographic features
• Signs (Notices)
• Smoking paraphernalia
• Sounds
• Sports
• Staffs (Sticks)
• State medicine
• Supernatural
• Surplus commodities
• Surveillance
• Swimming
• Symbols
• Tapping
• Teeth
• Tenure of office
• Testing
• Textiles
• Therapy
• Tiles
• Time
• Tires
• Tobacco products
• Toys
• Transportation
• Travel
• Twins
• Undertaking
• Vacations
• Vehicles
• Vessel components
• Veterans
• Violence
• Wages
• Water use
• Weather control
• Wigs
• Woodwork
• Wounds & injuries
• Writing materials

Other Observations

My brief exploration of this hierarchy revealed four levels to this hierarchy, but I can’t rule out the possibility that it goes deeper in some cases.  One limitation of these version of the TGM is the discrepancy that may exist between it and the LC version.  On my vistit on 07/23/06, the “About” note on TemaTres listed a date of creation of 04/07/07, with no indication as to how frequently it will be updated.  So you may miss a few terms here, but you’ll have a much better experience.  Actually, when you consider the poor interface on the LC site, you would likely miss even more terms on the official site.

My thanks to TemaTres and its MUCH better presentation of the TGM. This tool makes it easier to contemplate my plan to compare it with other visual material subject vocabularies.

26 More Vocabularies

Finally I can’t help noting that TemaTres offer another 26 vocabularies in the same format as well as other resources, how to, and FAQ’s.  Included are a mammalian taxonomy and the Unesco Thesaurus. More on the TemaTres Vocabulary Server and other vocabularies down the road.

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Tagged as: controlled vocabulary, Library and Information Science, Library of Congress, Metadata, ofness, Tematres, TGM, Thesaurus of Graphic Materials, XML