2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As research continues in the development of techniques to discover research by and about Indigenous People, this paper is focused on the classification systems and controlled/uncontrolled vocabulary used to index an ancient building type in Arizona and the Southwest. Starting with the articles found in Compendex and Inspec, the search was expanded to several engineering digital libraries and then compared to the indexing of these same articles in the social sciences and humanities databases using ProQuest and EBSCOhost platforms. By analyzing these indexed fields across disciplines, the goal is to focus on improving indexing terminology as Tribes develop or improve the thesauri and classifications systems in their own languages. While these structures are not specific to the O'odham peoples, the indexing of these articles will inform the creation of a O'odham thesaurus and classification systems currently under investigation and development at Arizona State University.