This paper reports the results of a University of Canberra Library survey of student research knowledge, skills, tools and resources. Students are experiencing difficulties interrogating databases, the internet and library catalogues because of the lack of consistency in terminology and various methods of interrogation. This research was an investigation of the need for an online contemporary natural language thesaurus. This report provides evidence that students interviewed in this survey support the idea and it is recommended that further research on a semantic contemporary natural language thesaurus be conducted and focused on higher education in Australia. (Contains 5 tables and 17 notes.)