Making metadata inclusive: content development in the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST)

Developing and updating thesaurus content in ELSST is crucial to ensure that it remains a current and relevant resource for data providers, distributors, archives and researchers. The process of content development is an ongoing, cross-national, collaborative enterprise undertaken by ELSST partners drawn from CESSDA’s Service Provider organisations. Together, we work to ensure that ELSST remains internationally recognisable and relevant. As a case study, this presentation will focus on a recent update to the ELSST concept hierarchy covering sexuality and gender, completed for the 2022 thesaurus release. It will cover the consultation and research process we undertook to ensure that the updated hierarchy was made as inclusive and comprehensive as possible. It will also describe how this experience has informed our practice for future updates to other potentially sensitive concept hierarchies. Making ELSST content inclusive not only reflects our duty to enable social justice by recognising diversity but also provides better and more precise keyword coverage for research resources. Consistent search results provided by ELSST’s comprehensive controlled vocabulary will allow researchers across the community to share and find useful data more easily, as social research evolves in a changing society.