Enhancing a subject vocabulary for Australian education

This article presents a case study focusing on the process of improving subject access to a collection of resources for teachers in the higher education sector. It describes how existing controlled indexing vocabularies in the education field were evaluated and how the Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors (ATED) was selected as the closest to the requirements. However as a general education vocabulary it lacked some of the specificity needed to describe higher education resources, so a process of incorporating further terms followed. The study highlights how established vocabularies can not only be used in different environments, but can themselves be strengthened through the process.