Visual Thesauri are controlled vocabularies constructed to provide a unified way for catalogers and indexers to identify and describe visual materials such as pictures, illustrations and photographs, thereby increasing their accessibility for researchers. A large part of librarianship consists of crafting methods by which patrons can successfully navigate collections of materials to find the items they need. By creating standard and uniform ways of referring to concepts which can be named any number of ways, such vocabularies hone in on the essence of materials and decrease wasted time by simplifying the task of catalog users in formulating their queries.

The need for analogous resources for processing visual materials led to the creation of the Library of Congress's Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Getty Research Institute's Art and Architecture Thesaurus over the last two decades. The recent rise in demand for images and concurrent technological advances have greatly expanded the need for effective retrieval strategies to avoid endless searching through mountains of data.

The purpose of this pathfinder is to provide catalogers and indexers with a means of exploring the field of visual thesauri. Another potential user group would be researchers of visual materials who wish to improve the quality of their searches in visual material databases using controlled vocabularies.

Adopting a controlled vocabulary involves an investment of time and resources and should follow on an examination of the options available. The target audience is any institution responsible for cataloging a visual collection, from a large academic library to a tiny archive with limited funds and every institution in between responsible for making a collection of visual materials accessible. Each will find helpful materials for managing its collection. While the materials presented are not exhaustive, they provide a representative slice of the field. Questions addressed by the collected materials include: What is a visual thesaurus? What visual thesauri are out there? What is the difference between 'concept-based indexing' and 'content-based indexing'? What are the problems and philosophical issues that arise in creating useful visual thesauri? How do the available visual thesauri compare in terms of scope, structure and adaptability? What alternatives to the primary vocabularies are there? What new developments are on the horizon?

My search first involved using UTNetCat to find the core texts and relevant subject headings. I then used these terms and related concepts to search selected Indexes and Abstracts available on the UT Library website. Last I used the terms I had gathered to query web search engines (http://www.google.com/ and http://www.hotbot.com/) to locate relevant web sites. The resources offered in this pathfinder are all available on the UT campus (as noted at the Perry-Castaneda Library (PCL), the Fine Arts Library, the Architecture Library and the Humanities Research Center), online through the UT Library online (www.lib.utexas.edu) or via the web.