Thesaurus for Graphical Materials

My keyword lists contain a huge range of easy-to-find, carefully organised everyday items that are ideal for all aspects of general and specialized photo-tagging and image keywording. There are other lists available, though, created for more specialised cataloging requirements. One of these was made by the U.S. Library of Congress, and is called the 'Thesaurus for Graphical Materials'. Here's what they say about it:

The Thesaurus for Graphic Materials is a tool for indexing visual materials by subject and by genre/format. The thesaurus includes more than 7,000 subject terms and 650 genre/format terms to index types of photographs, prints, design drawings, ephemera, and other pictures. In 2007, the subject and genre/format vocabularies, previously maintained separately, were merged into a single list.

The Thesaurus for Graphic Materials is readily available online , but its format is not very friendly or easy to use. Here is an example of one entry in text and XML format:

3-in-1 pictures
  USE:      Three-in-one pictures
  FUN:      Formerly TGMI term (nonpostable) & TGMII term (nonpostable).
  TTCForm:  Genre/Format (MARC 455)
  TTCSubj:  Subject (MARC 450)
  FCNgmgpc: gmgpc000001
  FCNlctgm: lctgm000002
  TNR:      tgm000002

<CONCEPT>
 <NON-DESCRIPTOR>3-in-1 pictures</NON-DESCRIPTOR>
 <USE>Three-in-one pictures</USE>
 <FUN>Formerly TGMI term (nonpostable) & TGMII term (nonpostable).</FUN>
 <TTCForm>Genre/Format (MARC 455)</TTCForm>
 <TTCSubj>Subject (MARC 450)</TTCSubj>
 <FCNgmgpc>gmgpc000001</FCNgmgpc>
 <FCNlctgm>lctgm000002</FCNlctgm>
 <TNR>tgm000002</TNR>
</CONCEPT>

In addition to a format not suitable for use in most image storage software, the files also contain characters such as punctuation and foreign accented letters that are not allowed in most image processing and storage software.

To help you around these problems, I created special software to process the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, transliterate accented letters, and convert it to a standard 'tab-indented list' format that is suitable for direct import into Lightroom, Bridge, Breeze Browser Pro, Photo Mechanic, FotoStation, and other programs. Here is a tiny example:

Ephemera
	Advertisements
		Ads
		Advertising cards
			Insert cards
			Sailing cards
				Clipper ship cards
					Yankee clipper cards

I do not charge for the data in my version of the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, which is not under U.S. copyright protection and is already in the public domain, but I do ask for a small amount to cover the extra work involved in creating a correctly formatted list: 20.00 USD for each list.

To obtain your tab-indented copy of the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials:

Thesaurus for Graphic Materials

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Notes

• The T.G.M. is completely separate from my keyword lists, and does not contain any of my standard categories.
• The list does not contain comments, Node Id numbers, or other codes.
• The data in the list has not been altered, apart from error correction as mentioned above.
• The list is the latest version that I have found, though newer versions may be available elsewhere.
• All commas, question marks, and other illegal characters have been removed.