New thesaurus for movable agricultural heritage available via the Network of Terms

January 30, 2026 · 2 min read

The Agricultural Heritage Thesaurus has been completed and is ready for publication via the Network of Terms. The terminology source contains more than 500 terms for historical farming tools, implements and utensils that were used until around 1965 in the Netherlands and Flanders.

The thesaurus focuses on objects that were handled by farmers themselves for the care of land, livestock and crops and for the processing of agricultural products. The terms are organised into the subdomains of arable farming, horticulture, animal husbandry, grassland farming, dairy and manure.

Over the past year, Marieke van Bommel and Anna van Velzen worked on inventorying, describing and structuring this terminology. They made use of literature research, museum collection records and visits to locations with agricultural heritage. Regional names have also been included and linked to each other, so that different names for the same object are connected.

The thesaurus is intended for collection managers and heritage professionals who want to register, digitise and make agricultural collections more accessible. By using a shared vocabulary, objects from different collections can be more easily related to each other.

The Agricultural Heritage Thesaurus was developed by the Network of Agricultural Collections (Netwerk Landbouwcollecties), with a contribution from the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS). Erfgoed Gelderland was the lead partner of the project. The parties involved remain available to keep the thesaurus up to date and supplement it where necessary.

The thesaurus is available from today via the Network of Terms.