The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is now available on the CESSDA platform.
Previously, the multilingual thesaurus was accessed through the UK Data Service but it has now been been moved to CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) to reflect its pan-European nature.
Users can now access ELSST here. It is currently available in 14 languages, freely accessible and covered by a CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence. People using the old link via the UK Data Service will be redirected to the CESSDA platform.
ELSST was originally based on the monolingual thesaurus, Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET), of the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex. The thesauri remain closely related. ELSST consists of over 3,000 concepts (keywords) and covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and, increasingly, environmental science. It is used for data discovery within CESSDA and facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary.
ELSST provides a structured, controlled vocabulary of keywords that can be assigned to diverse items within a collection, such as datasets or publications. Using a thesaurus such as ELSST, data providers (such as data archives, research centres and libraries) can attach similar keywords to items in their collections that are different in nature but cover similar topics. This ensures that materials in the collections are described in a consistent way.
In turn, this helps researchers in two ways; making catalogue searches easier by providing a set list of keywords to choose search terms from, and improving the accuracy of search results by ensuring that all items covering the selected topic are found.
Data Publishing and Curation Manager at the UK Data Service, Sharon Bolton, said: “The move of ELSST to the CESSDA website, and on to new technical platforms to enable enhanced interoperability and linked open data opportunities, has been the focus of 18 months’ intensive work.
“Planning and development have been carried out by an international project team drawn from staff at the UK Data Service, the CESSDA main office and the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD). The Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS) and the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD) also played a valuable role in testing. The move will raise the profile of ELSST as a key multilingual metadata tool and establish it at the forefront of international thesaurus development.”
ELSST is developed by a team drawn from several CESSDA Service Providers, who collaborate to ensure ELSST concepts remain current and relevant to researchers across the social sciences.
The 14 languages that ELSST is available in are : Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Staff at the Icelandic Social Science Data Service (DATICE, also known as GAGNÍS) are currently working on an Icelandic translation of ELSST, which we hope to add in 2021.