What is Eurovoc for?

Each year thousands, or rather tens of thousands, of items are added to the documentation generated by the activities of the European Union.

In the face of this growing mass of information, the documentation departments of the European Union institutions have sought since the early 1980s to equip themselves with a tool for indexing these documents. This need was felt particularly keenly in the Office for Official Publications, for the catalogue of the institutions’ publications and the indexes to the Official Journal, and in the European Parliament, for parliamentary documentation and for the library.

After examining the available tools, the Publications Office and the European Parliament decided to develop a multilingual thesaurus covering all the fields of activity of the European Union: the Eurovoc thesaurus.

Work on selecting descriptors and structuring the thesaurus was started by a team of documentalists and librarians from the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Publications Office. This work was assisted by the Commission’s Directorate-General for the Information Market and Innovation, a field taken over by the Directorate-General for the Information Society and Media, as part of its policy of supporting the development of multilingual thesauri.

The first edition of the thesaurus was published in 1984 in seven languages. Eurovoc has since had to adapt to developments in the European Union, to geopolitical changes and to language developments. In addition to the ad hoc updates, Eurovoc has been updated seven times, undergone a number of linguistic revisions and incorporated the new languages as the need arose. Macedonian, translated in 2012 by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs with financial support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, is the 25th language of the EuroVoc.

Eurovoc has played an important part in the indexing of European legislation and other legal texts (legislative proposals and other documents related to the decision-making procedure). It facilitates access to the acquis communautaire and, thanks to the standardisation of terminology, prevents problems in the preparation and/or translation of legislative instruments, particularly in the case of an accession country processing secondary legislation at the time of an enlargement.