Thesauri, or controlled vocabularies, are long-established tools for
improving how our users navigate and search our collections. New
technologies and services provide opportunities to enhance and expand these
legacy thesauri. The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social
Research’s (ICPSR) own thesauri was developed decades ago and has been used
by hundreds of thousands of students and researchers when browsing and
searching the ICPSR catalog.
This presentation will discuss ways in which ICPSR can update our thesauri.
For instance, can we completely switch to standardized identifiers, like
ROR and ORCiD, rather than updating our own Organizational Names Authority
List and Personal Names Authority List? How can we make better use of
complementary thesauri, like the Library of Congress Subject Headings or
the European Language Social Science Thesaurus? In what ways can we
remediate terminology using outdated or non-preferred terms? Discussion
points will include tradeoffs and resource costs.
jmwink@umich.edu