UK Archival Thesaurus

"UKAT is a subject thesaurus which has been created for the archive sector in the United Kingdom. It is a controlled vocabulary which archives can use when indexing their collections and catalogues. UKAT was created between June 2003 and August 2004 from subject terms contributed by individual archives, archive projects and users of archives. The backbone of UKAT is the UNESCO Thesaurus. However, while UNESCO covers a broad range of subject areas, it often lacks the depth of detailed terminology required by archives for indexing. It was therefore decided that UKAT should extend and adapt UNESCO to incorporate indexing terms which repositories and projects had devised themselves or incorporated from other schemes, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings or the British Education Thesaurus. UKAT has thus been created as a thesaurus conforming to international standards, with the coherent structure of UNESCO, but also significantly enhanced to include terms of relevance to the archive community and its users. Particular emphasis has been given to incorporating terms reflecting the histories and experiences of groups which are under-represented among archive users, to encourage their participation in the archival heritage in line with national priorities for the sector.

The key aims of UKAT are: to improve access to archives by subject; to ensure that users of archives can carry out effective subject searches of the national archives network; and to promote the involvement in archives by groups which are under-represented among archive users, by providing subject terms which reflect their histories and experiences."