A controlled vocabulary developed by the Collections department of the KITLV which includes subject terms relevant to the subect matter of the collections of the KITLV
The KITLV thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary developed by the Collections department of the KITLV which includes subject terms relevant to the subject matter of the collections of the KITLV. It consists of a limited number of terms (keywords) relating to the social sciences and humanities and, of course, to the geographical areas with which the KITLV is concerned i.e. the countries of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Oceania. The keywords are in English. The catalogues of the KITLV (books, periodicals and articles; manuscripts and archives; maps and charts; audio-visual materials) and the image database (photographs and prints) may be searched with keywords derived from the KITLV Thesaurus. The keywords used to describe the items in the image database constitute a subset of the full keyword list found in the thesaurus plus some extra keywords.
Where applicable the keywords in the KITLV thesaurus are linked together by three types of relationships:
- hierarchical relationships, which link terms to other terms expressing more general and more specific concepts, i.e. broader terms and narrower terms;
- associative relationships, which link terms to related terms where the relationship between the terms is non-hierarchical;
- equivalence relationships, which link non-keywords to synonyms or quasi-synonyms which act as keywords.
All keywords are allocated to 19 subject categories or descriptor groups. Each descriptor group comprises a number of subgroups. All groups and subgroups are identified by a number or sub-number. Some keywords are accompanied by scope notes which explain the meaning and application of terms. All keywords have translations in Dutch, Indonesian, French and Spanish. The KITLV thesaurus contains some 8,200 keywords of which some 900 are non-keywords.
This thesaurus facility may help you to find a keyword in English. By clicking on a letter on the main page of the thesaurus you access the index of keywords which start with that particular letter. Keywords are indicated in regular font, non-keywords in italics. By clicking on a term you access the full record of a term, which includes links to extra keywords of a related, more general or more detailed nature to help your search.