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Jennifer Howard

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Acronym Soup

April 12, 2012

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

Filed Under: Academe

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Jen Howard sitting in front of a brick wall. She is smiling.

Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more ยป

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