Building Up & Building out the Homosaurus Collective in Europe and Canada

The Homosaurus is a controlled vocabulary used by cultural heritage institutions to catalogue and describe LGBTQ+ people, communities, and cultural materials. Currently used by more than 100 institutions across 17 countries, it improves the discoverability of queer collections and enables more precise and representative descriptions of queer lives and histories. The Homosaurus thus intervenes in information practices that shape how LGBTQ+ materials are named, organized, and made visible within cultural heritage infrastructures. This project aims to strengthen collaboration between researchers and cultural heritage institutions in Canada and Europe, explore the translation and adaptation of queer metadata across languages and contexts, and lay the groundwork for a larger European research project.