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Hi Sheila:

The answers to this will be interesting to see.  The Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) has been the “industry standard,” to the extent that there is one, among art librarians since it was first a twinkle in the eye of Toni Peterson and her colleagues at Williams College.  However, I think in practice it has been used more by visual resources people than by “book” librarians.  I am retired now, but I have always been interested in thesauri and will be interested to see your responses.  When I was working as the Museum Librarian at the Craft and Folk Art Museum I purchased a thesaurus-building program (the name of which, unfortunately, now escapes me) and entered many terms in it that applied especially to folk art, contemporary craft, and product design.  Although the program was a good one—and I loved the process of creating the thesaurus links—I even took a couple of one-day courses on thesaurus-building back in the day--I more or less finally abandoned it as it just took too much time.  I guess the answer to your question may depend on whether or not you want an already-developed thesaurus (of course the AAT is constantly growing and changing) or do you want to be able to build your own?  Maybe the AAT now has the capability of including local terms.  I also can’t remember just now who is the head of their Vocabularies division—she’s been in that position for many years.  Here is the link to their website: http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/   I think access to all of their databases is free.  Good luck!

Joan

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