HILT Phase II - High-Level Thesaurus Phase II is a one year project funded by the JISC. The purpose of the project is to move HILT Phase I into the 'Pilot Project' stage, focussing - as recommended by the HILT Phase I evaluator - on terminology and thesauri requirements at the collection level, but also bearing in mind the need to extend this in due course to the needs of item level retrieval.

Phase II will utilise the work of HILT Phase I, and the skills and experience of the team that carried it out, to:

• Build an initial pilot, then develop it in line with user, service, and expert evaluator outputs
• Determine detailed requirements, costs, and benefits to FE and HE users of a full terminologies service focussed primarily on collection level needs.

HILT Phase I studied and reported on the problem of cross-searching and browsing by subject across a range of communities, services, and service or resource types.The list below is representative of the area but is by no means exhaustive:

• Libraries
• Museums
• Archives
• the DNR
• clumps
• the DNER
• the RDN
• bibliographic databases
• numeric data

The principle project aims of Phase II are to:

• set up a pilot terminologies route map or TeRM service, similar to that proposed in HILT Phase I (see Appendix A for description), aiming to:
  
  

  a) Provide a practical experimental focus within which to investigate and establish subject terminology service requirements for the JISC Information Environment, with particular reference to DNER, RDN, User, Collection Level, International Compatibility, and local, regional, national and UK-wide access considerations.
  
  

  b) Make recommendations as regards a possible future service, taking into account a range of factors, including the level and nature of user need, practicality, design requirements, effectiveness, functionality available in existing commercial software packages as against original development, and (above all) costs against benefits.

Throughout the project progress reports will be disseminated through this website, and discussion lists will be created to facilitate a dialogue between the different parties.