COAR is pleased to announce the public release of the “Resource Type” Controlled Vocabulary for Open Access Repositories, version 1.1. This vocabulary articulates the different types of content available in repositories (and other scholarly systems) in a standardized way. The vocabulary will enhance cross-repository interoperability and is currently available in 12 languages – English, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish.

Common vocabularies are an important aspect of interoperability by ensuring that everyone is using the same word to mean the same thing. Controlled vocabularies, if applied consistently, offer a common terminology for describing content, and greatly assist with the discovery, sharing and reuse of content. The COAR Resource Type Vocabulary uses the SKOS standard and supports a hierarchical model that relates narrower and broader concepts. The concepts are also mapped to terms and concepts of similar vocabularies and dictionaries.

To support the application of the vocabulary, COAR is offering instructional webcasts as well as (available soon) instructions to help repository managers implement the vocabularies in their own local environments.

In the near future, COAR will also produce several other multilingual controlled vocabularies including “date types”, “version types”, and “access modes”. COAR is committed to maintaining and updating the vocabularies as needed in the future.

Intrinsic to the nature of vocabularies is that they will change over time as resources evolve. We welcome your feedback on version 1.1
COAR would like to express profound thanks to the members of the COAR Controlled Vocabularies Editorial Board, led by Jochen Schirrwagen and Imma Subirats, for their great efforts and excellent work. The members of the editorial board are:
  • Alberto Apollaro, Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (MinCyT), Argentina
  • Sophie Aubin, INRA – the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, France
  • Paola Azrilevich, Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (MinCyT), Argentina
  • Isabel Bernal, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain
  • Ilaria Fava, Italian National Research Council (CNR), Institute of Information Science and Technologies, Italy
  • Dom Fripp, Jisc, United Kingdom
  • Gültekin Gürdal, Izmir Institute of Technology Library, Turkey
  • Ilkay Holt, Özyegin University, Turkey
  • Pedro Príncipe, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
  • Jochen Schirrwagen, University of Bielefeld, Germany
  • Tomoya Shiota, Digital Repository Federation (DRF), Japan
  • Iryna Solodovnik, Russian Language Version Editor of the AIMS website (FAO of the UN, OPCC)
  • Wilko Steinhoff, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), Netherlands
  • Imma Subirats, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – Agricultural Information Management Standards
  • Shenghui Wang, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), Netherlands
The “Resource Type” Vocabulary is available here. Please give us your feedback on it.
Information about the webcasts is available here. 

For more information or inquiries, please contact: the controlled vocabulary editorial team or the COAR office.