At one time, it seemed that the professional information intermediary was an endangered species, as information providers and software vendors alike fought to persuade anybody with a personal computer that searching was easy. Then came the revolution: distributed systems, full-text searching using a new breed of search engines, culminating in the arrival of the World Wide Web - that gargantuan, anarchic database that is said to double in size every 11 hours. The first books and standards on thesaurus construction, written in the 1970s, were addressed to professional information workers, many of whom had at least some understanding of the principles of classification but needed now to understand how to build tools with greater specificity and to effectively use the retrieval power offered by post-coordinate systems.
Alan Gilchrist, in Ontologies, Taxonomies and Thesauri in Systems Science and Systematics, 2010
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