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).
The new release of 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. DANS’s Widia Mahabier of the Data Processing Team has worked on the Dutch translations and on the update of this version.
Link ELSST and CESSDA Data Catalogue
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.
Updated language versions
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
ELSST is owned and published by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and its national service providers. The thesaurus consists of more than 3,300 concepts and covers the core disciplines of the social sciences: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and environmental science.
ELSST is used for searching data within CESSDA and facilitates access to data sources across Europe, regardless of domain, source, language or vocabulary.
