Glossary 

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N

O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

A

AHDS - Arts and Humanities Data Service. 

Athens - The Athens system created and operated by NISS, provides access management for subscription services supplied by publishers and subscription agents. Athens is a service of EduServ, a JISC funded service.

ALPSP - Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.

AMF - Access Management Federations.

ARNO - The ARNO project (Academic Research in the Netherlands Online) aims to develop and implement university document servers to make available the scientific output of participating institutions. The ARNO project is funded by IWI (Innovation in Scientific Information Supply). Project participants are the Universiteit van Amsterdam, Tilburg University and the University of Twente.

AVROSS - Accelerating Transition to Virtual Research Organisation in Social Science 

AWStats - AWStats is a free tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically.
 

B
 

Becta - Becta is the British government's lead partner in the strategic development and delivery of its e-strategy for the schools and the learning and skills sectors. Becta provides strategic leadership in the innovative and effective use of ICT to enable the transformation of learning, teaching and educational organisations for the benefit of every learner.

BL - The British Library.

C

CAUL - Council of Australian University Librarians.

CENL - Conference of European National Librarians.
The Conference of European National Librarians is a foundation under Dutch law with the aim of increasing and reinforcing the role of national libraries in Europe, in particular in respect of their responsibilities for maintaining the national cultural heritage and ensuring the accessibility of knowledge in that field. 

CERIF - Common European Research Information Format.

CLIR - Council on Library and Information Resources.

CLOCKSS - Controlled LOCKSS (see LOCKSS).

Cluster - Consortium Linking Universities of Science and Technology for Education and Research.

CNI - Coalition for Networked Information. A US based organisation with a remit to advance scholarship and intellectual productivity by realising the potential of advanced networks. JISC is a member of CNI.

CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research)

COUNTER - Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources.

Crawler - A computer program that gathers and categorises information on the Internet.

CRIS - Current Research Information Systems.

D

DAI - Digital Author Identifier.

DANTE - Delivery of Advanced Networking to Europe. A not-for profit company providing academic and research network links to most European countries.

DAREnet - Digital Academic Repositories Network. DareNet gives free access to academic research output in the Netherlands.

Dark Archives - Servers which store electronic journals for long term preservation.

DC - Dublin Core. A metadata standard used to describe digital materials.

DCC - Digital Curation Centre.

DDF-MXD - Danish Research Database Metadata Exchange Format for Documents.

DEST - Department of Education Science and Training (Australia).

DIDL - Digital Item Declaration Language.

DINI - Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (German Initiative for Network Information).

DiVA - DiVA, the Academic Archive Online (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet in Swedish), is a collaborative effort of a number of universities in Scandinavia which offers both publishing services and technical solutions for local repositories. The DiVA system, developed and maintained at the Electronic Publishing Centre at Uppsala University, Sweden, supports workflows for both electronic publishing and printing.

DK-AAI - Danish Authentification and Authorisation Infrastructure, now known af WAYF

DLF - Digital Library Federation.

DRIVER - Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (EU project).

DSpace - DSpace is an open-source digital archiving system designed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard to capture, manage and share research in digital formats.

E
 

e-SciDR - European infrastructure for eScience Digital Repositories.

EBLIDA - European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations and an independent umbrella association of national library, information, documentation and archive associations and institutions in Europe.

eContent Plus Progamme - The aim of the eContent Plus Programme is to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.

EDL - European Digital Library.

EDLnet - Thematic Partner Network.

EDLproject - EDLproject is a Targeted Project funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme, within the area of Cultural content and scientific/scholarly content.

EDUCAUSE - EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology in the United States.

EIROforum - European Intergovernmental Research Organisation forum.
The EIROforum is a collaboration between seven European intergovernmental scientific research organisations that are responsible for infrastructures and laboratories.

Electronic Journal - A learned journal, but not necessarily refereed, on the Internet. Electronic journals offer reduced time to publication, allow hyperlinking to other documents, and, in some cases, are enhanced by multi-media materials.

ePrints - The ePrints UK Project is developing a series of national, discipline-focused services through which the higher and further education community can access the collective output of e-print papers available from compliant Open Archive repositories, particularly those provided by UK universities and colleges.

ERA - European Research Academy.

ERC - European Research Council.

ERMI - Electronic Resource Management Initiative.

ESF - European Science Foundation.

ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations. The practice of publishing academic works digitally.
 

ERMS - Electronic Resource Management Systems.

ERS - European Research System.

ESFRI - European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures.

ESLOA - English as a Second Language Online Assessment

EUROHORC - European Heads of Research Councils.

H

h-prints – Humanities prints, a Danish project providing Open Access to research within the arts and humanities. 

I
 

i2010 - Digital Libraries Initiative.

IATUL - International Association of Technological University Libraries.

ICOLC - International Coalition of Library Consortia.

ICT - Information and Communication Technology.

IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force. The organisation which co-ordinates Internet standards.

IFLA - International Federation of Library Associations.

ILL - Inter Library Loan.

IMS - Instructional Management Systems. A Global Learning Consortium. A global coalition of academic, commercial and government organisations, working together to define the Internet architecture for learning. IMS is an initiative of EDUCAUSE.

Information Environment - The aim of the Information Environment is to help provide convenient access to resources for research and learning through the use of resource discovery and resource management tools and the development of better services and practice. The Information Environment aims to allow discovery, access and use of resources for research and learning irrespective of their location.

INRIA - The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique).

Internet2 - Internet2 is a development project funded by over 100 American universities to develop leading edge Internet applications and the next version of the Internet Protocol (IP).

IPA - International Publishers Association.

IPR - Intellectual Property Rights.

ISI - Institute of Scientific Information (ISI Web of Science).

ISPI - International Society for Performance Improvement.

ITT - Invitation to Tender. A tender document is typically used to request proposals from consultants.

J
 

JANET - Joint Academic NETwork. This network links all higher education institutions, Research Council sites, many further education colleges and other bodies with a legitimate interest in working with the higher education and research community.

L

LOCKSS - Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

LOM - Learning Object Metadata. The attributes required to fully or adequately describe a learning object.

M
 

MARC - MAchine-Readable Cataloguing. A communications standard for exchanging bibliographic holdings, and other data' between libraries. It defines a bibliographic data format that emerged from a United States Library of Congress-led initiative that began in the 1970s. It provides the protocol by which computers exchange, use, and interpret bibliographic information. Its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogues used today.

MARCXML - An XML schema based on the bibliographic MARC Standards.

Metadata - Data describing an information resource, sometimes referred to as 'data about data'.
 

METIS - METIS is a research information database system in the Netherlands, which enables universities, organisational units within universities, research institutes, research groups or individual researchers to register information online about their current research projects.

Middleware - Middleware is a layer of software between a network and applications. This software provides services such as identification, authentication, authorisation, directories, and security. In today's Internet, applications usually have to provide these services themselves, which leads to competing and incompatible standards. By promoting standardisation and interoperability, middleware will make advanced network applications much easier to use.

MODS - Metadata Object Description.

N
 

NISO - National Information Standards Organization.

NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA).

O

OA - Open Access.

OAI-PMH - Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

OAR - Open Access Repositories.

OCLC - Online Computer Library Centre.

OJS - Open Journal Systems.

ONIX - Online Information Exchange.

OpenDOAR - Directory of Open Access Repositories.
 

Open Source - Any software whose code is available for users to look at and modify freely. Linux is the best-known example.

OPUS - Optimising the use of Partial information in Urban and regional Systems. OPUS was a three-year project, funded under the European Commission 5th framework IST research programme. It was approved in April 2003 and completed at the end of April 2006. The web site will remain in operation as a focus for discussion of the methodology developed under OPUS. 

ORE - Object Reuse Exchange.

P
 

Portal - A network service that brings together content from diverse distributed resources.

Q
 

QAA - Quality Assurance Agency. Standards of higher education that define academic standards and quality.

R

RSS - Really Simple Syndication used to refer to automatic news updates online.

S 

Sahara Crawler - An open source harvesting tool for repositories. It was developed by the DARE programme and is also being used by the DRIVER project.

 

SAML - Security Assertion Mark-up Language.

 

SCA - Strategic Content Alliance.

 

SHERPA - Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access. SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research.

 

Shibboleth - Shibboleth is standards-based, open source middleware software which provides Single Sign-On (SSO) on the Web across or within organisational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorisation decisions for individual access to protected online resources in manner that preserves privacy.

SOA - Service Oriented Architecture.

SORD - Selected Organic Reactions Database.

SPARC Europe - SPARC Europe is an alliance of European research libraries, library organizations, and research institutions.

SPARC USA - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

SPs - Service Providers.

SSO - Single Sign On.

Sun PASIG - Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group.

SUSHI - Standardised Usage Harvesting Initiative.

SWAP - Semantic Web Application Platform.
 

T
 

TERENA - Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association.

TRANSFER - TRANSFER is a UKSG working group aiming to create a central repository containing mandatory and optional fields that should be completed by publishers when titles move between them.

U

UKSG - United Kingdom Serials Group.

V

VLE - Virtual Learning Environment.

VPNC - Virtual Private Network Consortium.
 

VRE - Virtual Research Environment.

W

W3C - World Wide Web Consortium. A global industry consortium run jointly by the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of technology and INRIA in France. It exists to develop common standards for the evolution of the World Wide Web.

VASCODA - vascoda.de is an internet portal for all those looking for scientific and scholarly information. It offers user-friendly access to reliable information and full texts from an extremely wide range of different subject areas.

WAYF - Where Are You From