The Project CLIP – Compatibilização de Linguagens de Indexação em Português (Harmonization of Subject Indexing Languages in Portuguese) - is a cooperative initiative for the integrated development and management of subject terms within the community of libraries participating in PORBASE - the National Bibliographic Database.
Harmonizing subject vocabularies used by different libraries to provide access to information is especially advantageous to either the end user, by making different catalogues compatible, and the library staff , by rationalizing efforts and improving the quality of the work. These are aspects of utmost importance in the context of PORBASE due to its collective nature.
While a common subject retrieval strategy exists n PORBASE, by the adoption of UDC as a common standard, this has not been considered sufficient and efficient for retrieval purposes but to a certain level of generality, not overcoming the problems of integrating in a single subject alphabetical index differently produced and managed terminologies.
The Project CLIP was launched in the 1st PORBASE Conference, held in December 1988, to foster methodologies of cooperation and from which resulted the CLIP Regulations, aproved in 1989, containing its objectives and terms of reference.
The work in this Project is developed through Thematic Groups focused on defined subject areas. The results from some of these groups are already available as approved terminologies.
