LAOAP: Glossary of terms

AAU: Association of American Universities
ARL: Association of Research Libraries
CIRMA: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica
CRL: Center for Research Libraries
Data provider: A data provider maintains one or more repositories (web servers) that supports the OAI-PMH as a means of exposing metadata. (Definition quoted from the Glossary in the OAI for Beginners, the Open Archives Forum online tutorial)
DC: Dublin Core; Dublin Core (DC) is a metadata format defined on the basis of international consensus. The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set defines fifteen elements for simple resource description and discovery, all of which are recommended, and none of which are mandatory. DC has been extended with further optional elements, element qualifiers and vocabulary terms. (Definition quoted from the Glossary in the OAI for Beginners, the Open Archives Forum online tutorial)
DCMI: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative; The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global workshops, conferences, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices. (Definition quoted from the Glossary in the OAI for Beginners, the Open Archives Forum online tutorial)
FLACSO: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales
Grey literature: Working documents, pre-prints, research papers, statistical documents, and other difficult-to-access materials that are not controlled by commercial publishers. Also spelled Gray literature.
GRN: AAU/ARL Global Resources Network
Harvester: In OAI-PMH a harvester is a client application issuing OAI-PMH requests. (Definition quoted from the Glossary in the OAI for Beginners, the Open Archives Forum online tutorial)
Harvesting: In the OAI context, harvesting refers specifically to the gathering together of metadata from a number of distributed repositories into a combined data store. (Definition quoted from the Glossary in the OAI for Beginners, the Open Archives Forum online tutorial)
ISP: Internet Service Provider; A company which provides other companies or individuals with access to, or presence on, the Internet. (Definition quoted from FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing)
LANIC: Latin American Network Information Center
LAOAP: Latin American Open Archives Portal
LAPTOC: Latin American Periodicals Tables of Contents
LARRP: Latin Americanist Research Resources Project
OAI: Open Archives Initiative; OAI is an initiative to develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. (Definition quoted from the Glossary in the OAI for Beginners, the Open Archives Forum online tutorial)
OAI-PMH: The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting; OAI-PMH is a lightweight harvesting protocol for sharing metadata between services. (Definition quoted from the Glossary in the OAI for Beginners, the Open Archives Forum online tutorial)
OPAC: Online Public Access Catalog
OCR: Optical Character Recognition; Recognition of printed or written characters by a computer. Special software is available to perform OCR. (Definition quoted from FOLDOC- Free Online Dictionary of Computing)
PDF: Portable Document Format; A universal file format that preserves the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. (Definition quoted from the Adobe Reader website.)
Service provider: A service provider issues OAI-PMH requests to data providers and uses the metadata as a basis for building value-added services. A Service Provider in this manner is "harvesting" the metadata exposed by Data Providers. (Definition quoted from the Glossary in the OAI for Beginners, the Open Archives Forum online tutorial)
SRG: Static Repository Gateway; A Static Repository Gateway provides intermediation for one or more Static Repositories. It assigns each such Static Repository a unique Static Repository base URL, all with a common Static Repository Gateway URL prefix, and thereby exposes each individual Static Repository as an individual OAI-PMH Repository. (Definition quoted from the Implementation Guidelines for the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).
TICFIA: Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access
TIFF: Tag(ged) Image File Format; A file format used for still-image bitmaps, stored in tagged fields. (Definition quoted from FOLDOC-Free Online Dictionary of Computing)

The contents of this website were developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the U.S. Federal Government.