The latest report from the Vocabularies in CESSDA project (VOICE) shows good progress in increasing functionality, building capacity and improving the user experience – and provides evidence of greater impact.
VOICE is a service to manage the multilingual content of the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives European Research Infrastructure Consortium (CESSDA ERIC).
CESSDA brings together social science data archives across Europe, to promote the results of social science research and support national and international research and cooperation. Vocabularies in CESSDA (VOICE) includes work on the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) and policy and guidelines for managing multilingual content.
Functionality
The project partners have now agreed a multilingual content policy, including implementation plans for the Data Catalogue, ELSST and CV Manager.
Changes to the English version of ELSST, previously agreed with the project partners, were completed at the end of June. These have been translated into the ELSST languages in preparation for the next release of ELSST content, which is on track for September 2018.
Capacity building
Translating ELSST core terms to CESSDA Service Providers’ native languages will allow a common approach to indexing study data, which will make it easier to search for and filter data across Europe.
User experience
The UK Data Service and the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) carry out regular translator training for new translators and those needing a refresher course. They do pre-webinar exercises, an online webinar and produce translator guidelines – as well as updating the training after each session based on feedback. All translators must undertake training before working on ELSST.
Anne Etheridge, Discovery Manager at the UK Data Archive, says: “The project is going well, with all the project partners taking an active role in discussing changes and preparing for the release of new content. The training of translators has been very effective, too.”
CESSDA VOICE runs until December 2018. In 2019, it will become part of the CESSDA Metadata Office.
New Catalogue
CESSDA will be launching its new catalogue in the next few weeks enabling a one-stop-shop for researchers to search, discover and access European research data across Europe.