Today's LIS Word

Visit Daily for New LIS Word

**Start your day with a word from LIS Cafe**

Reference

A conventional word or phrase used in a work to refer the reader to another part of the text (see above or see below) or a similar word or phrase used in an index, catalog, or reference work to direct the user from one heading or entry to another (see or see also). Also refers to any Latin phrase used in footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies to refer the reader to works previously quoted or cited, for example, ibid. and op. cit. Sometimes used synonymously with citation.

Also refers to a letter written in support of a person's application for employment or housing, usually by someone familiar with the applicant's qualifications or reputation, or to a person who agrees to be contacted for such a recommendation, usually by telephone.

****Yesterday's LIS Word****

Gray literature

Documentary material in print and electronic formats, such as reports, preprints, internal documents (memoranda, newsletters, market surveys, etc.), theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, technical specifications and standards, trade literature, etc., not readily available through regular market channels because it was never commercially published/listed or was not widely distributed. Such works pose challenges to libraries in identification (indexing is often limited) and acquisition (availability may be uncertain). Absence of editorial control also raises questions of authenticity and reliability. Alternative methods of supply and bibliographic control have evolved in response to the need to preserve and provide access to such material. In the United States, the gray literature of science and technology is indexed in the NTIS database. Theses and dissertations are indexed and abstracted in Dissertation Abstracts International and are available in hard copy via Dissertation Express. Click here to learn more about finding gray literature, or see the article Gray Literature: Resources for Locating Unpublished Research by Brian S. Mathews in the March 2004 issue of C&RL News. Also spelled grey literature. Compare with ephemera and fugitive material.

Federal Research Public Access Act

Bipartisan legislation co-sponsored in the U.S. Senate in 2006 by John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) requiring federal agencies that fund more than $100 million in annual external research to make electronic copies of peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from their nonclassified research publicly accessible over the Internet at no charge within six months of publication. According to C&RL News (June 2006), a coalition of library and public interest groups led by SPARC worked with the offices of Senators Cornyn and Lieberman on the development and introduction of the bill, which is supported by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) whose members include the Genetic Alliance, Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy, the Christopher Reeve Foundation, and 67 other patient, academic, research, and publishing entities, including the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).

Libraries Serving Special Populations Section (LSSPS)

The section of the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA) within the American Library Association (ALA) whose members are committed to improving the quality of library service for people with special needs, including users who (1) are elderly; (2) have vision, hearing, mobility, or developmental impairments; and/or (3) are in correctional institutions, health care facilities, and other types of institutions. LSSPS is also committed to improving library service for families and professionals working with people who have special needs.

Self-checkout

An automated circulation system that allows registered borrowers to check out circulating materials on their own without the assistance of library staff, usually by means of a unique barcode or RFID tag attached to each item (see this example). Self-checkout is part of a trend toward self-service in library operations.

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)

A technical standard for accessing digital information over wireless networks using handheld devices. A WAP browser is a Web browser for mobile devices.

Bibliographic Hermaphrodite

A term coined by Crystal Graham, serials librarian at the University of California, San Diego, in reference to a publication in any medium that has characteristics of both monographs and serials. Most are complete in one part but have the potential to continue. Their defining characteristic is "updatability." Examples include loose-leaf services, databases, Web sites, and some electronic journals. Beginning in 1995, reconsideration of issues related to seriality resulted in a new model, dividing the bibliographic universe into finite resources and continuing resources, a more accurate reflection of changing patterns in publishing. This new distinction has been adopted in AACR2 2002.

Information Access Alliance (IAA)

A coalition formed in the spring of 2002 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), American Library Association (ALA), Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), Medical Library Association (MLA), Special Libraries Association (SLA), and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) to develop a unified strategy for dealing with the impact of anticompetitive behavior by scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journal and legal serial publishers on the ability of libraries to provide students, faculty, researchers, health care workers, policymakers, and the public with information essential to research and teaching.

IAA's first step was to commission the legal firm Ropes and Gray to draft a white paper to provide the Department of Justice and members of Congress with background on the effects of mergers and concentration in the publishing industry on scholarly communication. An international symposium on antitrust issues in academic publishing was co-sponsored with the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) at the Georgetown University Law School on February 11, 2005 (see Lee Van Orsdel's report in the May 2005 issue of C&RL News). IAA is also building a network of key spokespersons who recognize the essential role of access to information in maintaining the health and welfare of society. IAA members are devoted to finding alternative models of scholarly communication and are promoting efforts to move toward an open access environment.

Raster Data

Digital data represented as a cellular grid matrix composed of rows and columns (a raster) representing space as a continuum (example: a digitally scanned image or photograph). Each cell or pixel in the matrix is referenced by an x, y coordinate stored as an identifier to which values can be assigned to indicate the magnitude of attributes in space. A group of cells with the same value represents a map feature, for example, terrain of a given elevation class. Georaster data is georeferenced, either to the globe or to a specified map projection, each pixel of data representing a known patch of territory on the surface of the earth. The same cell in another matrix of similar specifications referenced to the same space can be used to represent data of a different type, permitting the accumulation of layers of data. A digital elevation model (DEM) is a raster data set of elevation values derived from a printed topographic map (click here to see an example). Because a line defined by a group of pixels along its length requires more file space than a line defined by a vector, certain map features are more economically stored as digital line graphs (vector data) than as digital raster graphics.

Abstracting Service

A commercial indexing service that provides both a citation and a brief summary or abstract of the content of each document indexed (example: Information Science & Technology Abstracts). Numbered consecutively in order of addition, entries are issued serially in print, usually in monthly or quarterly supplements, or in a regularly updated bibliographic database available by subscription. Abstracting services can be comprehensive or selective within a specific academic discipline or sub discipline. Compare with abstracting journal.

Call Number

A unique code printed on a label affixed to the outside of an item in a library collection, usually to the lower spine of a book or videocassette (see these examples), also printed or handwritten on a label inside the item. Assigned by the cataloger, the call number is also displayed in the bibliographic record that represents the item in the library catalog, to identify the specific copy of the work and give its relative location on the shelf.

In most collections, a call number is composed of a classification number followed by additional notation to make the call number unique. This gives a classified arrangement to the library shelves that facilitates browsing. Generally, the class number is followed by an author mark to distinguish the work from others of the same class, followed by a work mark to distinguish the title from other works of the same class by the same author, and sometimes other information such as publication date, volume number, copy number, and location symbol.

Scholarly Communication

The means by which individuals engaged in academic research and creative endeavor inform their peers, formally or informally, of the work they are engaged in or have accomplished. Following a tradition that began with the Academy in ancient Athens, scholars communicate by writing monographs and journal articles for publication, presenting conference papers that may subsequently be published in proceedings and transactions, submitting reports in fulfillment of grant requirements, creating and maintaining Web sites for the academic community, and corresponding with peers via e-mail and electronic mailing lists. Broadly defined, the process includes not only the creation and dissemination of scholarly works but also evaluation of quality (peer review) and preservation for future use. One of the goals of academic libraries is to facilitate scholarly communication in all its forms.

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

Introduced in 1987, TEI is an international interdisciplinary standard intended to assist libraries, museums, publishers, and scholars in representing literary and linguistic texts in digital form to facilitate research and teaching. The encoding scheme is designed to maximize expressivity and minimize obsolescence. TEI began as a research project organized cooperatively by the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, funded by research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the European Union, the Canadian Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and others.

Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD)

Formerly known as Functional Requirements for Authority Records (FRAR), FRAD is an extension of the FRBR model for relating the bibliographic data contained in library authority records to the needs of library patrons and librarians who use the records. Developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), FRAD is designed to assist persons who work with library records in finding and identifying a specific entity or group of entities, contextualizing the entity, and justifying choice of access point.

Click Here for more LIS Words