Redefining the Library: glossary
We are redefining the Library to meet the opportunities and responsibilities offered by the upsurge of digital information.
Technological innovation has created new words and given old ones new meaning. Throughout this document we have used words that are part of the new vocabulary of information science and technology. Some of these words haven’t yet been captured and defined by the lexicographers – but we’re responding to the changes they entail even as they’re coined.
aggregator A service that gathers information published by different sources and organises it together under a common search interface. The aggregator may also license access to a collection of journals from many different publishers.
born digital Relating to a document that was created and exists only in a digital format. (www.wordspy.com)
dataset A dataset is any organised collection of data or information that has a common theme. A dataset might be a list of objects, a digital map, records of geological borehole samples, a collection of photographs at a certain location or of a certain subject, a database comprising records of pollution sites, a scientific report, a listing of results from a school project. (www.IndexGeo.com.au)
deep web Also known as ‘invisible web’. Refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases, that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. Both qualitative and quantitative in difference, deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines. (www.llrx.com)
digital repository An organisation that has responsibility for the long-term maintenance of digital resources, as well as for making them available to communities agreed on by the depositor and the repository. (www.rlg.org)
digitisation The process of converting information into a digital format. In this format, information is organised into discrete units of data (called bits)
that can be separately addressed (usually in multiple-bit groups called bytes). This is the binary data that computers and many devices with computing capacity (such as digital cameras and digital hearing aids) can process. (www.whatis.com)
e-legal deposit The UK Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 extends previous legal deposit legislation passed nearly 100 years ago and enshrines the principle that electronic or e-publications and other non-print materials will be deposited in future under secondary legislation. It ensures that these publications can be saved as part of the published archive – and become an important resource for future generations of researchers and scholars.
grid computing Applying the resources of many computers in a network to a single problem at the same time – usually a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data. Grid computing uses software to divide and farm out pieces of a program to as many as several thousand computers. A number of corporations, professional groups and university consortia have developed frameworks and software for managing grid computing projects. (www.whatis.com)
hybrid The hybrid library is one which provides a one stop shop for both hardcopy and electronic resources. Its information systems should provide the end user with a seamless interface that will allow them to locate printed books and journals held locally and at neighbouring sites at the same time as being able to find relevant online resources, electronic publications and digitised material. (www.ariadne.ac.uk)
imaging Imaging is the digital capture, storage, manipulation and delivery of copies of analogue originals, which may be texts, manuscripts, pictures or other information types.
ingest The process by which a digital file is accepted and loaded into a digital store, together with its descriptive information for subsequent retrieval.
Integrated Catalogue The British Library’s most ambitious automation project. The project involved the migration of 29 million catalogue entries and related records from 14 legacy systems to a single cost-efficient collection management system. It is freely accessible on the web and in our Reading Rooms, and is the front end of the Integrated Library System which underpins a seamless acquisitions, cataloguing and ordering process.
knowledge transfer Within a modern, knowledge driven economy, knowledge transfer is about transferring good ideas, research results and skills between universities, other research organisations, business and the wider community to enable innovative new products and services to be developed. (www.ost.gov.uk)
metadata Data which describes other data. For example, a description of a database in terms of its structure and the relationship between the entities in it. (www.oxfordreference.com).
Open Access Digital works that are made available often at no cost to the reader on the public Internet for purposes of education and research. (US Association of Research Libraries: www.arl.org)
portal A web site or service that provides access to a number of sources of information and facilities, such as a directory of links to other web sites, search engines, email, online shopping, etc. (OED).
remote services Services supplied to users who are not onsite to take personal delivery. Remote services may be analogue or digital; remote users may be in
the next street or across the world.
resource discovery Resource discovery involves the searching, locating and retrieving of information resources on computer-based networks, in response to queries of a human user or an automated mechanism. (www.digicult.info)
SME Small to medium-sized business enterprise; usually plural, SMEs. (OED)
text mining Also known as data mining. Information extraction to discover hidden facts contained in databases. Using a combination of machine learning, statistical analysis, modelling techniques and database technology, data mining
finds patterns and subtle relationships in data and infers rules that allow the prediction of future results. (www.twocrows.com). A key element is the linking together of the extracted information to form new facts or new hypotheses to be explored further by more conventional means of experimentation. (www.sims.berkeley.edu)
Virtual Research Environment The purpose of a VRE is to help researchers in all disciplines manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research. A VRE will provide a framework of applications, services and resources to support the underlying processes of research.
(www.jisc.ac.uk)
WiFi Short for ‘wireless fidelity’. A term for certain types of wireless local area networks (WLAN) that use specifications conforming to IEEE 802.11b. WiFi has gained acceptance in many environments as an alternative to a wired LAN. Many airports, hotels, and other services offer public access to WiFi networks so people can log onto the Internet and receive emails on the move. These locations are known as hotspots.
