Throughout your professional library reading, you will occasionally come across esoteric library technology acronyms. It’s annoying to have to stop reading to look up their meanings. To help prevent that, we present our list of more common library technology acronyms.
These acronyms have been added to the Library Technology Acronyms page, a dictionary of library technology terms.
AD FS – Active Directory Federation Services, a Microsoft service that allows for single sign-on (SSO).
APC – Article Processing Charge, a fee charged to an author by an open access journal to publish an article.
AWS – Amazon Web Services, a cloud Web services hosting platform used by several library vendors including ProQuest and Springshare.
COinS – ContextObjects in Spans, bibliographic metadata added to HTML in a webpage.
DNS – Domain Name System, a decentralized system for looking up domain names for conversion to IP addresses.
EAD – Encoded Archival Description, an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids by the Library of Congress and Society of American Archivists.
EDS – EBSCO Discovery Service, a discovery service offered by EBSCO.
EPUB – Electronic Publication, a standard for ebooks and other electronic publications by the International Digital Publishing Forum.
FOLIO – The Future of Libraries is Open, an open-source library services platform currently in development.
III – Innovative Interfaces, Inc., a library software vendor.
LMS – Learning Management System, used to manage educational courses. (Occasionally Library Management System.)
OAI-ORE – Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange, standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources.
OAI-PMH – Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, a model for extracting metadata from an open repository.
OCR – Optical Character Recognition, the process of converting scanned text into text-based documents for reading and indexing.
OER – Open Educational Resources, freely accessible materials such at open access textbooks, articles, and educational videos.
ORCID – Open Researcher and Contributor ID, a unique and persistent digital identifier. (Read more about ORCID.)
SSH – Secure Shell, usually used to refer to a remote computer login to run system commands.
SSO – Single Sign-on, typically using your institution login credentials to access third-party database and websites.
VIAF – Virtual International Authority File, a global file of standardized bibliographic creator names with links by OCLC.
VPN – Virtual Private Network, a secure network connection that allows a remote user to access an organization’s internal network.