CERL News

CERL staff post items of interest to our members on these pages. Please select a link in the left hand column to view that year's news items.

When on or after 18 June 2018 you opened the CERL Thesaurus, you were greeted by a new interface.

This was the outward manifestation of a mountain of behind-the-scenes work undertaken by the Data Conversion Group, Göttingen (DCG), in support of their migration of the CERL Thesaurus to a new hosting environment. At launch, the new interface was available in English, German and Italian, but more languages were planned to be added. Like the MEI databases, the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, the Scottish Book Trade Index and the other databases that CERL hosts, the CERL Thesaurus is now supported by an Elastic Search environment and all the benefits that come with it.

The presentation of the records in both cleaner and richer, and capitalises fully on the options for presenting both external and internal links to related information. In place name records you will find clickable links to, for example, all who worked in that place and whose births or deaths were recorded there. In the records for persons you may find links to biographies, to name authority files, to related CT records, as well as clickable links to places of activity.

In connection with the migration the editing workflow has also been updated and modernised, which makes the work of the team of CERL Editors much easier. Now that the migration is completed and the editing interface has been updated, we are in a position to open the CERL Thesaurus up for more editors and researchers who can contribute to improving and de-duplicating CERL Thesaurus records. What has not changed, we are pleased to note, is that data recorded in the CERL Thesaurus is published as Linked Open Data and made available under the terms of Etalab's Open Licence, which can be considered equivalent to ODC-BY and CC-BY 2.0. Feedback on the new interface may be shared with us by sending an e-mail to Marian Lefferts.