Starting August 1, 2025, the State Hall will open daily at 9 a.m.
Annual maintenance work will take place again this summer, which is why the reading rooms at the Heldenplatz location and in all collections will be closed from Friday, July 25, to Tuesday, August 5, 2025.
Due to the shutdown of the ordering system, no media orders can be accepted from Thursday, July 24, 2025, 4 p.m. to Tuesday, August 5, 2025, 4 p.m. The regular opening hours will then apply again from Wednesday, August 6, 2025.
The Ariadne Thesaurus is a controlled, feminist vocabulary for the subject indexing of journal articles and book chapters on women’s and gender studies. It was developed by Ariadne starting in 1992, has been regularly updated since, and is currently being revised.
With over 11,500 terms, the Ariadne Thesaurus forms a comprehensive, interdisciplinary network of concepts:
It includes both specialized terms from women’s and gender studies (e.g. patriarchy, gender mainstreaming, women’s movement) and key concepts from related disciplines – such as industrialization, colonialism or education. Feminist indexing also requires more general terminology drawn from fields such as history, sociology, politics or medicine.
All terms are standardized and systematically linked – via broader and narrower terms, synonyms, related concepts and, in some cases, English equivalents.
Through direct integration with QuickSearch, the catalogue of the Austrian National Library, it is possible to search specifically within the “Special Collection Ariadne” – i.e. in all documents indexed using the Ariadne Thesaurus.
The Ariande-Thesaurus is currently undergoing a comprehensive revision.
The published version represents the current state – as a practical tool, a point of reference, and a starting point for further conceptual development.
While selected terms are available in English, the Thesaurus is primarily developed and maintained in German. Indexing is currently carried out in German only.
A thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary – a structured collection of terms that are systematically related to one another: through broader and narrower terms, synonyms, related concepts, or translations.
This improves the discoverability of literature – in a way that is both precise and intellectually traceable.
Feminist vocabularies are more than documentary tools: they make perspectives visible that are often missing in general vocabularies and authority files – such as queer topics, feminist theory terms, or concepts from women’s movements.
They respond to biases and exclusions in established classification systems and deliberately offer alternative systems of terms.
Feminist vocabularies have a history of their own – emerging as a response to gaps and distortions in universal authority data. They represent a form of active linguistic and conceptual critique.
The Ariadne Thesaurus stands in this tradition.
Some key milestones:
The Ariadne Thesaurus is a local further development of thesaurA – and is now available as a public research tool.
The Ariadne Thesaurus facilitates focused and precise searches for publications in the field of women’s and gender studies – it helps you to:
The Ariadne Thesaurus is based on the international standard SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) and is published using the open-source software Skosmos.
Each term in the Ariadne Thesaurus is linked to a search query in QuickSearch, the catalogue of the Austrian National Library:
Clicking on a term performs a search within the “Special Collection Ariadne” – which includes journal articles and book chapters – and displays all titles indexed with either the preferred term or one of its synonyms.
Conversely, catalogue records in the “Special Collection Ariadne” include a general link back to the homepage of the Ariadne Thesaurus.
