If you live in Washington and/or write about higher education, you swim in a sea of acronyms. Because I like making lists, I made a list of the acronyms that float through my brain on a regular basis. (This isn’t all of them, just the ones I can think of late on a Thursday night.)
Is it possible to live an acronym-free life? How many short strings of letters can our brains handle? This is, maybe, a serious question.
AAA
AAP
AAUP
AAUP
ACLS
ACRL
ARL
AHA
AHR
CLIR
CNI
DH
DPLA
FRPAA
GBS
JAH
LOC
MLA
NARA
OA
OCR
OER
PIPA
PSP
RWA
SAA
SOPA
SPARC
Key:
AAA–The American Anthropological Association
AAUP–The Association of American Publishers
AAUP–The Association of American University Presses (I sometimes say “presses, not profs,” when I use this one, depending on whom I’m talking to)
AAUP–The American Association of University Professsors (I tend to think of this as “the other AAUP” because I don’t write about this one very much)
ACLS–The American Council of Learned Societies
ACRL–The Association of College and Research Libraries
AHR–The American Historical Review
ARL–The Association of Research Libraries
AHA–The American Historical Association
CLIR–The Council on Library and Information Resources
CNI–The Coalition for Networked Information
DH–Digital humanities
DPLA–The Digital Public Library of America
FRPAA–The Federal Research Public Access Act
GBS–Google Book Search
JAH–The Journal of American History
LOC–The Library of Congress (sometimes just LC)
MLA–The Modern Language Association
NARA–The National Archives and Records Administration
OA–open access
OCR–optical character recognition
OER–open educational resources
PIPA–The Protect Intellectual Property Act
PSP–The Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of AAP
RWA–The Research Works Act
SAA–The Society of American Archivists
SOPA–The Stop Online Piracy Act
SPARC–The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
