The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. It is available in fifteen languages: Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. The ELSST is owned and published by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA).
New innovations
The September 2024 release of the ELSST (Version 5) includes revisions to terms associated with civil status, family structure, disability and the education of students with special educational needs and disabilities. Work has also begun on updating the science and technology hierarchy.
A major development since the last release of the thesaurus is the link that has been established between the ELSST and the CESSDA Data Catalogue. The CESSDA Data Catalogue contains descriptions of more than 40,000 data collections held by CESSDA’s Service Providers, originating from over 20 European countries.
Clicking on the ‘Keyword search’ link for a term in the ELSST finds all CESSDA Data Catalogue records that have been assigned that term as a keyword, or which have a keyword from another vocabulary that matches it. Links are also provided from the CESSDA Data Catalogue back to the ELSST thesaurus.
These innovations aim to enhance the discoverability of data in the CESSDA Data Catalogue by enabling users to learn more about the concepts and navigate through the thesaurus structure. Further details can be found in a presentation given at the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) and Association of Canadian Map Libraries and Archives (CARTO) 2024 conference in May 2024.
All language versions have been updated except for Finnish and Romanian, where no new translations have been added to this release. The ELSST previously contained a Danish translation, which is no longer available. For more information, see the ELSST documentation, including the Version 5 Release notes.
Background
The thesaurus is used for data discovery within CESSDA and facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary. It covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and environmental science.
The UK Data Service is funded as Service Owner for the ELSST by CESSDA. The Service Owner is responsible for hosting the thesaurus management system, where content is updated, and for managing and delivering the updated content to the CESSDA web platform, hosted by CESSDA. UK Data Service staff work collaboratively with translators from CESSDA Service Provider organisations to update ELSST content to ensure coverage reflects the changing nature of international social science research.