For the canned voced searches, we will depend on descriptors used withing voced. Do we have a current list of building & construction industry terms? Do we make much use of such terms? How difficult will it be to identify the set of abstracts? (do you need more resources, or are there external resources we can call upon?)

-- Anonymous, July 24, 2001

Answers

I'll check the terms and the records and provide a list of both. It will not be a big job.

We do not have terms for industries to a very deep level because it has not been necessary for indexing the type of research and policy information we collect for VOCED. I would imagine that each industry will have have a term that describes it and that those terms are unlikely to be broken down further.

I have just done a quick initial search in VOCED and found that the the term we use is "construction industry". 369 items are returned on a search for construction+ in every field. This is the best way to search as it will pick up any with construction in the abstract that may not have been indexed with the term. Of course the word may have been used in another context (which is why I wouldn't advise using building by itself - too likely to refer to skill building).

Another question to bear in mind is whether we want this to be just Australian stuff - there is a huge amount of overseas material appearing in every VOCED search result set now. Do we want to exclude this? Give people a choice? Not easy with earlier material in VOCED where the country code was not used as rigorously as we do now.

The larger job is the identification of related sites - both initially and then the monitoring of them. I have spoken to Hugh about this and I think the best approach is to spend a set amount of time (I suggested a day) on capturing the initial set. Lea-ann did a similar exercise on identifying sites as learning resources for an Edna project, with James S-R, and the recommendation of that project was that it is a huge task to do this work and highly labour-intensive to maintain. As we of course know from our own links work. One of the areas she looked at for that project was the B&C industry and so she will have a set of links to start from. It will be interesting to see how out of date that set is, a year or so later.

-- Anonymous, July 25, 2001