AAAS - American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC.
Acrobat - A program developed by Adobe Systems which allows documents to be distributed with complex formatting (fonts, spacing, graphics, etc.) to users with DOS, Macintosh, or Unix computers without their needing to have the program used to create the document in order to view it. PDF is the name of the internal format used by Acrobat, and also the extension normally used in the name of an Acrobat file.
ACS - American Chemical Society, Washington, DC.
AMS - American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI.
APA - American Psychological Association.
APS - American Physical Society, New York, NY.
Archie - A network service that allows users to find which anonymous FTP sites contain specific files of interest.
ASIS - American Society for Information Science, Silver Spring, Maryland.
Bitmap - A file format for digital images which treats the image as a two-dimensional array of pixels. This approach is distinguished from the alternate approach of describing an image as a collection of primitive shapes - lines or objects.
BITNET - Because It's Time NETwork. A network created in the 1980s by EDUCOM, connecting primarily academic and research sites. (The number of BITNET sites has remained fairly static in the last few years, as many of the sites have been able to acquire Internet connections.)
CARL - Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. A consortium of six large research libraries in Colorado. The CARL database includes the combined holdings of these libraries and a variety of other data. CARL also operates UnCover, a document delivery system for journal articles.
CICNet - A regional Internet service for the midwestern United States, founded by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. CICNet maintains an electronic journal archive accessed by thousands of Internet users. This archive is one of the most comprehensive such sources on the network.
Client - A computer in a network which uses services, programs, or storage provided by a separate "server" computer.
ARPA - Advanced Research Projects Agency. (Also known as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) The agency which initially sponsored the development of the ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet.
DECnet - A set of network protocols and programs developed by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and commonly used on DEC's computers. DECnet is a proprietary networking system distinct from TCP/IP.
Domain - A group of IP addresses corresponding to a specific site, group, university, or company, from which the IP address for a specific machine can be assigned.
EARN - European Academic and Research Network
Email - Electronic mail. Mail composed and transmitted on a computer system or network.
EU - European Union. The EU has generated a number of initiatives in telecommunications and networking as part of an overall plan for its members.
FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions. A collection of answers to the most frequently raised questions in any of a large number of different subject areas, commonly created and distributed over USENET.
Follett Report - Its full title is Joint Funding Council's Libraries Review Group: Report, December 1993. The report was written for the Higher Education Funding Councils of the England, Scotland, and Wales, and the Department of Education for Northern Ireland. This review of library and related issues in higher education in the UK was chaired by Professor Sir Brian Follett, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick. It put forward major recommendations for addressing information issues in UK universities and secured funding for a wide range of important projects as instantiations of the recommendations.
FTP - File Transfer Protocol. A standard method for sending files from one computer to another on TCP/IP networks such as the Internet. FTP is also the name of the command used to initiate transfer of files. Anonymous FTP is a common practice which permits users to access some parts of an FTP site without needing an account and password for the site. Access usually is gained by using the username "anonymous" or "ftp". By convention, the user should enter their e-mail address as the password.
ftp.uu.net - A computer on the Internet widely used as a source for publicly distributed materials, including shareware, USENET digests, and FAQs.
Gigabyte - one thousand megabytes, or approximately one billion seventy million bytes (actually 1,024 megabytes).
GNU zipped (gzipped) - GNU is an acronym for Gnu is Not Unix. The GNU project has developed and freely distributed a number of utilities which are widely used on Unix computers. One of these utilities is a compression program (gzip) which is widely used as an alternative to the standard Unix compression program. A gzipped file is normally distinguished by the extension *.gz, as opposed to the *.Z extension used by the standard Unix compression program.
Gopher - A program which uses a network of interlinked menus for accessing publicly distributed resources and documents on computers distributed across the Internet.
Gopher+ - An expanded and updated version of the original Gopher software, produced (like the original) at the University of Minnesota. Gopher+ supports a wider variety of file types and protocols. Gopher+ is not yet widely used.
Group-4-FAX - the format used by high speed Group 4 facsimile machines to transmit page images.
GUI - Graphical User Interface. A computer terminal interface, such as Windows, that is based on graphics instead of text.
HEP preprint network (HEPnet) - A "High Energy Physics" service created by Paul Ginsparg of the Los Alamos National Laboratories. It is the standard electronic networked source by which the high energy physics research community accesses preprints. Ginsparg has cloned the software for a number of other related disciplines.
HTML - HyperText Markup Language. A markup language based on but simpler than SGML used to annotate hypertext documents for publication on the World Wide Web, to take advantage of the WWW;s capacity to connect documents and sectins of documents across the Net.
HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol. A protocol used to transmit files over the World Wide Web.
Hytelnet - A single database providing access to Internet resources via a menu structure.
IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, New York, NY.
IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF, a volunteer organization, develops Internet standards and discusses operational and technical problems of the Internet.
info.anu.edu.au - Address for the Gopher server at the Australian National University. The server includes a section on the electronic library, as well as information on electronic journals. (ANU gopher server)
Intellectual Property Task Force - The Association of American Universities Task Force on Intellectual Property Rights in an Electronic Environment, part of the Research Libraries Project. The Task Force worked to develop proposals for university policies on intellectual property issues. The Task Force issued a report in April, 1994. See the Hyperlinks section for the URL for the Internet version.
InterNIC - The Internet Network Information Center. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the InterNIC provides services such as access to an archive of Internet standard documents and the assignment of IP addresses for the Internet community at large.
ISO - International Standards Organization. The principal international group responsible for standards in many areas. For purposes of this discussion, the standards referenced for electronic communications.
JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association.
JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group - This group developed and gave their name to a standard method for compression of digital images and a format in which to store the compressed file.
LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Department of Energy's National Laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
LaTeX - A variant of the TeX text formatting program using a set of macro commands useful for formatting mathematical manuscripts.
LISTSERV - Software which enables a distributed electronic discussion group to function. Each subscriber to a particular LISTSERV receives the submissions of all other subscribers. The electronic discussion group is itself referred to as a LISTSERV. Other softwares that perform similar functions include Listproc, Majordomo.
LOC - Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Lynx - A program to browse the World Wide Web which works on simple text terminals, rather than requiring a graphical computer display terminal.
MacTCP - An extension to Apple's Macintosh operating system which enables Macintosh personal computers to use the TCP/IP Internet protocols, and thus to connect to the Internet.
MajorDomo - A software program for the management of electronic mailing lists and discussion groups. It provides similar functions to those of the LISTSERV and Listproc programs.
Minitel - The telecommunications software and network developed and widely used in France. Minitel was initially developed and distributed as an electronic alternative to printed telephone directories, but has evolved into a popular personal communications system.
Mirror image archives - A duplicate of a collection of files normally available from one Internet server at a different site, in order to permit users to access files from a computer closer to them, or to avoid problems caused by excessive usage at the original site.
Mosaic - See NSCA Mosaic.
MPEG - Motion Picture Experts Group. A committee of experts from the audio, video, and computer industries developing an evolving series of standards for compression of moving images. Files encoded using this standard are referred to as MPEG files. MPEG-1 is a low-resolution format currently used on the World Wide Web for short animated files. MPEG-2 is a much higher resolution format being developed for digital television and movies.
NCSA Mosaic - Mosaic is a program which permits browsing the World Wide Web with a graphical interface, which allows users to explore the Web more easily. It was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. After the development of Mosaic, some of the NCSA team left and formed a new startup group which quickly offered another highly popular interface, Netscape, to the public.
Netscape -- See Mosaic, above.
NII - National Information Infrastructure - A set of new government funded initiatives to develop a more advanced form of national computer network, particularly as advocated by the Clinton/Gore administration.
NSF - National Science Foundation.
NSFnet - One of the Internet's backbone networks funded by the National Science Foundation. (Now discontinued, as part of the transition of the Internet from government funding to a commercial service.)
OCLC - Online Computer Library Center, Inc., Dublin, Ohio. OCLC is a major commercial provider of library cataloging services and runs the Online Union Catalog.
PostScript - A page description language developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. PostScript can be used by a wide variety of computers and printers, and is the dominant format used for desktop publishing. Documents in PostScript format are able to use the full resolution of any PostScript printer, because they describe the page to be printed in terms of primitive shapes which are interpreted by the printer's own controller. PostScript is often used to share documents on the Internet because of this ability to work on many different platforms and printers.
Red Sage - A popular Washington restaurant which gave its name to a group of publishers and librarians interested in electronic publishing which was formed at a lunch at the restaurant. The group then spawned a project by the same name. Its original parnters included an AT&T developed software called "Right Pages, the Medical School at the University of California, and several publishers of journals in radiology.
SCI - Science Citation Index. Produced by the Institute for Scientific Information, SCI indices show the pattern of citations of scientific journal articles.
SGML - Standard Generalized Markup Language. SGML is both a language and an ISO standard for describing information embedded within a document. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is based on the SGML standard.
SIAM - Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA.
SLAC - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University. SLAC is the site of an extensive archive of preprints for high energy physics.
Software - A program or set of instructions that controls the operation of a computer. Distinguished from the actual hardware of the computer.
src.doc.ic.ac.uk - Address for the Gopher server at the Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.
TeX - A powerful text formatting program initially written by Donald Knuth. Widely used by computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists.
TIFF - Tagged Image File Format. A file format commonly used for digital scanned images. Images saved in TIFF format can be used on most computers. Developed by Aldus and Microsoft.
TULIP - The University LIcensing Program. TULIP is a cooperative research project testing system for networked delivery and use of journals. Objectives include determining technical feasibility, developing organizational and economic models, and studying user behavior. For testing purposes, 42 materials science and engineering journals published by Elsevier and Pergamon are being used.
UNESCO - United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, whose headquarters is in Paris, France.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is the "address" for something made available through the World Wide Web. A URL consists of the access method, server name, directory, and file name. Although the URL was developed for WWW, it has become widely used to describe the location of files which may be accessed by other techniques.
USENET - An informal system of electronic bulletin boards or discussion groups commonly distributed over the Internet. USENET predates the Internet, although today most USENET material is distributed over the Internet.
Veronica - Veronica is a program to search an index to all Gopher server titles in the world. The program was developed at the University of Nevada. The initials stand for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives.
VT100 - Originally, a video display terminal manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation. It is now the most commonly supported plain text terminal type used for network connections.
WAIS - Wide Area Information Servers. A software program originally developed by Thinking Machines Co. which permits the very rapid search of extensive indexes to find text in large documents.
World-Wide Web (WWW) - A hypertext system of cross-linked data sources, which permits easy access to or publication of complex data types, including text, graphics, sound and animation, across the Internet. Initially developed at CERN (the European Center for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland.