Introduction
Origin of the Thesaurus
In June 1971, a team of researchers in the Faculty of Education at Université Laval, headed by Jean-Charles Lessard, put out a preliminary report about a retrieval system project in the field of education. The researchers entitled their report SCTIE (Système de compilation et de transmission de l’information en éducation – System for the compilation and transmission of information in the field of education), and were largely inspired by the American system ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) and its thesaurus of descriptors.
Shortly thereafter, the newly created Centre de documentation CADRE (Centre d’animation, de développement et de recherche en éducation) developed its own tool – the Thésaurus de descripteurs sur l’éducation (Thesaurus of descriptors in the field of education) – in order to index its own collection. This tool was based on the draft created by the team at Université Laval. The thesaurus vocabulary was updated periodically by the team at the Documentation Centre. The following specialists were involved in the thesaurus’s development:
- Lise Breton
- André Contant
- Roland Desrosiers
- Gérard Rochais
- Henri-Paul Sénécal
- Jean-Luc Roy
In June 1990, CADRE transferred responsibility for its documentation on public education, particularly its documentation on college-level education, to the Direction générale de l'enseignement collégial of the Ministère de l'éducation du Québec. This led to the creation of the Centre de documentation collégiale (CDC), which set up shop at a new facility within Cégep André-Laurendeau. For over thirty-five years, the CDC’s collection has been indexed according to the Thésaurus de descripteurs sur l'éducation.
In June 2000, the CDC proudly took over from where CADRE left off, and became officially responsible for the Thésaurus de descripteurs sur l'éducation. The CDC undertook a complete revision of the fifth edition of the thesaurus, which was put out in 1996, and renamed it ÉDUthès : thésaurus de l’éducation.
The thesaurus revision took place between December 2000 and June 2001, in accordance with the Guidelines for the Establishment and Development of Monolingual Thesauri, and with several education-based thesauri and reference tools, all of which are listed in the Bibliography section.
The revision focused on the following elements:
- the addition or removal of hierarchical or associative relationships in accordance with the Standards for
Thesaurus Construction; - the addition of synonyms and quasi-synonyms;
- the addition of definitions in order to clarify the meaning of certain descriptors. The added definitions were taken
from various thesauri and dictionaries in the field of education. A source code (e.g., TCE = Thésaurus canadien
de l’éducation / Canadian Education Thesaurus) can be found at the end of the hierarchical structure for each
descriptor, thereby allowing users to immediately know the source of the indexed definition; - the addition of scope notes in order to provide precise guidelines regarding the use of certain descriptors;
- the addition of an English equivalent for each French descriptor.
A complete list of the modifications made and the reasons behind these modifications has also been created, and is available to thesaurus users.
The purpose of the thesaurus is to help documentation centre and library staff in the field of education organize their collection and index their documentation. It can also be used as a tool for online research.
