The English name of Tieteen termipankki has changed. The new name, chosen by the steering group of the term bank is The Helsinki Term Bank for the Arts and Sciences (HTB). By the new name, we want to emphasize our readiness for international cooperation. We had also received some feedback about the old name The Bank of Finnish Terminology in Arts and Sciences. Besides the intended emphasis on the Finnish language, it could evoke a wrong idea of Finnish research having a terminology of its own. The Arts and Sciences are international in their essence. However, terminology is not always wholly harmonized between different languages and research cultures. The multilingual website of the HTB brings this to the fore.
It has also been proposed that we should call the website a term media rather than a term bank because it offers a platform for much more information and discussion than only terms and their equivalents. It is indeed possible and desirable to introduce the background of the terms in the concept pages: conceptual history, knowledge frames and the discourses where the term finds its proper context. It is in the hands of our experts, how much information they want to give in their terminological work. The content is created by niche-sourcing of the researchers in each field. Moreover, we welcome new volunteers!
The expert groups consist of researchers all over Finland at different universities and research institutes – and to a growing extent also internationally. Interdisciplinary and multilingual research groups can use the website in creating a terminological common ground for their joint approach ‒ just look at the field of Clean Energy Research as an example.
Thus the city name Helsinki refers only to the place where the infrastructure is coordinated. On the National Roadmap of Research Infrastructures the HTB is in cooperation with FIN-CLARIN. The title with the city name in it follows the example of many large international corpora or databases etc. (e.g. The Helsinki Corpus on English Texts, London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English). In addition to that, we hope that it brings a hint of “Helsinki spirit” in it – a willingness to constructive cooperation.