I found the Homosaurus controlled vocabulary six years ago while looking for an authoritative source to establish the naming convention for the Lived Places Publishing Queer and LGBT+ Studies collection. In the years since first discovering Homosaurus, I have followed the growth of this global, community-led resource with much interest.
The mission of Homosaurus is to deliver and constantly refine a set of community-defined terms that can be integrated into cataloging, metadata creation, and discovery systems. The project originated in the 1980s at the University of Amsterdam Documentation Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies. It has since grown to include 40+ members, organized as a collective, based in nine countries. There are versions available in English and Spanish, with versions in Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Swedish either in development or planned for launch. In 2016, the Homosaurus became an approved thesaurus for subject headings in MARC records, thus confirming its central place in metadata creation.
The use case for which I first discovered the Homosaurus, seeking an authoritative resource for naming conventions, is a common scenario. Imagine a field researcher developing an interview guide or a museum curator creating descriptive text about an artist, but the primary use case is enhancing and improving catalogue records through MARC record enhancements and corrections. This “intervention,” if you will, by cataloguing librarians with the Homosaurus in hand, has proven to be a necessary step in correcting the historical inequities and prejudices embedded in library classification systems. As libraries onboard new content and records, the Homosaurus and other similar community-driven controlled vocabularies provide a necessary resource for editing MARC fields and descriptions within MARC fields to reflect contemporary and community-validated meanings.
The Homosaurus operates with input and feedback from its community of users. This can include suggested new terms or edits to existing terms. These suggestions are added to the language committee’s term development list, as long as they do not duplicate an existing entry. Each term then needs full committee approval before being considered for publication. This is a rigorous, editorial process, informed by the lived expertise of community members and vetted by the Homosaurus Collective. New terms and updates to existing terms, once fully approved, are released on a semi-annual basis.
As anyone in the information, research, and education space with an interest in preserving and growing our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility can attest, we are living through difficult times. The work of catalog record enhancement, accurately capturing meaningful differences and correcting past labeling convention errors, is quiet, behind-the-scenes work, but it is no less urgent and no less under threat by the actions of a government seeking to erase such efforts through censure, funding removal, mandated language changes on government-funded institutional pages, and worse. The Homosaurus Collective has been no less impacted. Funding for Spanish-language translation of the Homosaurus, for example, was pulled under the Trump administration. And the leadership of the Homosaurus Collective knows that many folks who quietly use the Homosaurus could lose their jobs if they become too vocal about its central place as a resource in their cataloguing and indexing work.
Respect. We cannot respect others if we cannot accurately recognize and understand how they self-identify. This is not “wokeism.” This is basic respect for other people, just as each of us wishes to have our identity correctly indicated. I look forward to watching the Homosaurus grow and evolve.
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References
St-Amour, D, et al. “Building and sustaining the Homosaurus, an inclusive LGBTQ+ linked data vocabulary.” Catalogue & Index no. 214 (2026): 22–30. https://journals.cilip.org.uk/catalogue-and-index/article/view/879/741.
This article first appeared on Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE), a DEIA-focused content vertical from Choice, which is a publishing unit of the American Library Association. The original post can be read here. To receive regular updates from TIE regarding DEIA news in higher education and academic publishing, sign up for the TIE newsletter.
