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News Creating Inclusive Metadata: Exploring Homosaurus

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As part of our commitment to inclusive metadata, MEAP encourages teams to use controlled vocabularies that best align with their projects. One of these vocabularies is the Homosaurus, a dynamic and ever-expanding international linked data vocabulary of LGBTQ+ terms. In honor of Pride month, and in recognition of LGBTQIA+ communities around the world working to document, preserve, and make accessible collections that reflect their experiences, MEAP student assistant, Sam Stroud, writes about Homosaurus and why it matters.

The Homosaurus is used by archives, museums, public libraries, and academic libraries across over a dozen countries to enhance the LGBTQIA+ vocabulary used to describe their collections. While the Homosaurus is not a replacement for the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) or other dominant vocabularies, the Homosaurus Editorial Board has positioned it as a “complement, alternative, opponent, and critique to/of LCSH.”[1] Queer and trans people are often inadequately described or entirely absent from rigid, cisheteronormative classification systems. The Homosaurus succeeds in filling in the gaps where other vocabularies have excluded LGBTQIA+ communities and voices and/or misrepresented them.

To achieve broad representation, the project remains open, adding terms and collaborating with organizations such as AVEN, the Black Lesbian Archives, COLAGE, InterACT, the Leather Archives & Museum, and the Sex Worker Project as part of their commitment to enabling communities to name and describe themselves on their own terms. The Homosaurus is maintained by the Digital Transgender Archive and governed by the Homosaurus Editorial Board to ensure ongoing revision and update.

--Sam Stroud, MEAP student assistant

MEAP has joined dozens of information institutions using the Homosaurus to enhance the accessibility of LGBTQIA+ materials. In particular, we recommend project teams documenting LGBTQIA+ collections employ the Homosaurus in their work, ensuring that queer and trans people can represent their own experiences with expansive terminology and that people can discover these resources using the language and terminology that is most familiar to them and their community.

The "Homosaurus Documentation and Implementation" guide asserts that “the person and/or community writing or talking about themself will know better how they want to be described than any other person or group.”[2] MEAP shares this ethos, aiming to provide support for communities around the world to document their own cultural heritage from their perspective and ensure that their experiences are well preserved.

[1] Marika Cifor and K.J. Rawson, “Mediating Queer and Trans Pasts: The Homosaurus as Queer Information Activism,” Information, Communication & Society 26, no. 11 (August 18, 2023): 2168–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072753, 2172.

[2] "Homosaurus Documentation and Implementation" Guide 1.0 (Fall 2023), https://docs.google.com/docume....