Inland Waterways Terminology Working Group
Project Background
The reasons for embarking on the construction of a thesaurus date back to April 1999 when the Boat Museum at Ellesmere Port, National Waterways Museum in Gloucester, the Canal Museum, Stoke Bruerne and the British Waterways Archive merged under the management of a new body called The Waterways Trust.
An immediate aim was to unify the catalogue held across the 3 museum sites and, as the Trust had been awarded Designated status following the merger, this work became central to a Designation Challenge Fund project. It soon became apparent that the aim of bringing together a unified electronic catalogue could only be realised with strict terminology control and so it was decided to embark upon building a thesaurus of waterways specific object names.
Published in 2002 the thesaurus is available through these pages at: http://www.mda.org.uk/waterw/.
It is also available in printed form. See our publications page.
