A controlled vocabulary for nursing and allied health in Norway

Nursing and allied health libraries at educational institutions in Norway have generally indexed their book collections with uncontrolled terms. With the reorganization of higher education in 1994, the majority of these libraries joined BIBSYS, which is a joint library system for higher education and research in Norway. This has led to chaos when searching the joint catalogue for literature on nursing and related fields. A term such as 'behaviour problems' may have up to five synonyms. In an attempt to improve the quality of searching the health literature, BIBSYS appointed a working group in the Spring of 1999 to find a suitable controlled vocabulary for this subject area, and to see how this vocabulary could be integrated into BIBSYS. The group presented its recommendations in October 1999. The report has been well received by the BIBSYS Board and by user groups. There are no Norwegian vocabularies that are suitable for use in nursing and allied health, therefore it will be necessary to translate and combine existing thesauri. The group has looked at the Nordic Multilingual Thesaurus on Health Promotion, the Swedish Spriline Thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and CINAHL Subject Heading List. Other relevant thesauri are AMED/CATS Thesaurus, Bioethics Thesaurus (Bioethicsline) and the RCN thesaurus. The group recommends the development of a Norwegian thesaurus based on a translation of parts of MeSH and CINAHL Subject Heading List.