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Reports of the death of controlled vocabularies and indexing in the age of full‐text retrieval have turned out to be somewhat exaggerated. We quickly found that the old ‘garbage in, garbage out’ rule applies, and that from the point of view of any one user at any one time, much of the text in a full‐text database is garbage. That is, it does not provide the required information, even if it happens to contain the words in the query. On the other hand, text that happens not to contain query words may still be very useful.

The quotation from Henry Longfellow's The Arrow and the Song: first appeared in the Target 2000 column in the first issue of the relaunched Online & CDROM Review in 1993. Since then a number of arrows have been aimed at developments that could be expected by the turn of the century. As this column was envisaged as a “floating Delphi”, this seems an appropriate point in the run‐up to the millennium to review the projections made to date. Below they have been reviewed and grouped, and it is hoped that in the coming months the authors may wish to expand or revise their original thoughts. The year, volume, issue and page numbers for the journal reference are given after the author’s name.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology for assessing thesauri and other controlled vocabularies management tools that can represent content using the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) data model, and their use in a Linked Open Data (LOD) paradigm. It effectively analyses selected set of tools in order to prove the validity of the method.

A set of 27 criteria grouped in five evaluation indicators is proposed and applied to ten vocabulary management applications which are compliant with the SKOS data model. Previous studies of controlled vocabulary management software are gathered and analyzed, to compare the evaluation parameters used and the results obtained for each tool.

The results indicate that the tool that obtains the highest score in every indicator is Poolparty. The second and third tools are, respectively, TemaTres and Intelligent Theme Manager, but scoring lower in most of the evaluation items. The use of a broad set of criteria to evaluate vocabularies management tools gives satisfactory results. The set of five indicators and 27 criteria proposed here represents a useful evaluation system in the selection of current and future tools to manage vocabularies.

The paper only assesses the ten most important/well know software tools applied for thesaurus and vocabulary management until October 2016. However, the evaluation criteria could be applied to new software that could appear in the future to create/manage SKOS vocabularies in compliance with LOD standards.

The originality of this paper relies on the proposed indicators and criteria to evaluate vocabulary management tools. Those criteria and indicators can be valuable also for future software that might appear. The indicators are also applied to the most exhaustive and qualified list of this kind of tools. The paper will help designers, information architects, metadata librarians, and other staff involved in the design of digital information systems, to choose the right tool to manage their vocabularies in a LOD/vocabulary scenario.

In response to its mission of identifying and describing problems of interdisciplinary searching, and of proposing remedies and solutions, the ICSTI Group on Interdisciplinary Searching gathered the relevant information through a questionnaire addressed to the database builders, online system vendors, search intermediaries and end users; analysed and organised the input; and presented a report. The report discusses the problems within six distinct categories: coverage and technical content of the database; bibliographic information; textual content; numeric data; file organisation, and interdisciplinary searching on multiple hosts. Under each category, problems are first listed in a generic way and then described in greater detail. Numerous specific examples are given with explanations, whenever feasible, of the reasons for their occurrence. For each category, possible remedies and solutions are listed. The most essential recommendations that have emerged deal with the need for greater standardisation at every stage in building the databases and in organising access to them. A number of bodies and groups working on international and national standards, and on solving other specific aspects of the problems, have been identified. The needs for close co‐operation, exchange of good documentation, extensive training and mutual understanding are most evident.

EEVL, the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library, is a gateway to engineering information on the Internet. After a brief outline of the need for such a gateway and the background to the EEVL project, this article looks at certain similarities and differences in the development of EEVL and various other subject based information gateways (SBIGs) such as ADAM, SOSIG, and OMNI, and similar services such as BUBL. EEVL’s present situation and future prospects are outlined.