Use this guide to learn about Ngā Upoko Tukutuku | Māori Subject Headings and how to use them in Library Search | Ketu. Launched in 2006, Ngā Upoko Tukutuku was the first indigenous thesaurus in the world. Since then it has continued to grow to include more than 2000 terms.
"Ngā Upoku Tukutuku was developed by the Māori Subject Headings Project, jointly sponsored by LIANZA, Te Rōpū Whakahau, and the National Library of New Zealand"
If you have any pātai | questions about Ngā Upoko Tukutuku, suggestions for new terms, or wish to organise a workshop for your students and/or colleagues please contact one of our Library Kaiāwhina.
This video with Raewyn Paewai explains how and why Ngā Upoko Tukutuku / Māori Subject Headings began and how the Māori world view was integrated into the cataloguing world.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
...we have created a tab with examples of items found using 'Hauora' and related terms in our Dunedin campus libraries.
"Māori Subject Headings provide subject access in te reo Māori to materials for and/or about Māori. The thesaurus framework offers a structured path to a Māori world view within library and archival cataloguing and description" (Taken from : OCLC Māori Subject Headings)
Subject Headings are standardised terms (hashtags for researchers) that are applied consistently by descriptive metadata experts to allow researchers to search and retrieve all results on a topic.
Library of Congress subject headings are routinely added to records, but two studies in the late 1980s demonstrated a need for the addition of Ngā Upoko Tukutuku / Māori Subject Headings. Researchers were unable to find material within library collections that were either in the Māori language or written from a Māori worldview.
Before Māori Subject Headings were introduced, a resource on the topic of haka was assigned the subject heading Folk dancing, Maori (New Zealand people). If the term "haka" did not happen to be in the title or description of a record, then researchers might fail to find any results on the topic. With the introduction of Ngā Upoko Tukutuku / Māori Subject Headings, you can not only search for haka, but also for broader, narrower and related terms. Specific types of haka include:
