Glossary¶
This page collects terms, acronyms, and system names that come up across the Digital Collections
documentation. It is meant as a quick reference for new team members — deeper documentation for many
of these systems lives in Cultural Heritage Collections, Legacy Infrastructure, Software, and Systems, and the
applications/ and workflows/ sections of this site.
Archipelago-specific terminology (ADO, AMI, Strawberry Field, TWIG, and friends) has its own glossary at Terminology; the most load-bearing of those terms are also summarized below for convenience.
- ADO¶
Archipelago Digital Object. Any digital object or digital object collection managed in Archipelago. Every ADO has a type (or worktype), such as “Book” or “Image”, that determines how it is displayed.
- AMI¶
Archipelago Multi-Importer. The module used to batch ingest ADOs into Archipelago from a spreadsheet.
- ARK¶
Archival Resource Key. A persistent identifier scheme used to provide long-term, stable access to digital objects even if their storage location changes. We mint ARKs via EZID. See Minting ARKs with EZID.
- Avalon¶
Avalon Media System, the platform used to deliver streaming audio and video collections, built on Fedora.
- Cantaloupe¶
The IIIF image server used to serve zoomable, deep-viewable images for our digital collections.
- CAP¶
Curator’s Administration Platform. An in-house, open-source application that provides a common UI and API for institutional repositories participating in a Digital Asset Management Ecosystem.
- CWS¶
Creative Works Series. An ADO type used for multi-page or multi-part objects (such as a book) where individual pages or parts need to be browsed and, in some cases, programmatically paired with OCR/HTR text.
- DOI¶
Digital Object Identifier. A persistent identifier commonly used for journal articles, datasets, and other scholarly outputs, often minted through EZID or OJS.
- DPMT¶
Digital Project Management Team. The cross-functional team responsible for reviewing, prioritizing, and shepherding digitization and digital collection projects from intake through completion. See the DPMT process documentation for how projects move through the team.
- DSpace¶
The open-source repository platform that powers OAKTrust, our institutional repository.
- EZID¶
A persistent identifier service (provided by the California Digital Library) that we use to mint and manage ARK and DOI identifiers.
- Fedora¶
The repository backend used for cultural heritage collections (served through SAGE or Spotlight) and for audio/video collections served through Avalon.
- HOCR¶
An HTML-based format for representing OCR output, including the position of recognized text on a page image. Used to align searchable text with page images in multi-page objects.
- HPRC¶
Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing. The campus unit providing the computational infrastructure that supports our AI/ML initiatives.
- HTR¶
Handwritten Text Recognition. Similar to OCR, but for transcribing handwritten materials such as manuscripts and correspondence.
- IDEA Document¶
The proposal document a stakeholder submits to DPMT to request a new digital project. It kicks off the DPMT intake and review process.
- IIIF¶
International Image Interoperability Framework. A set of open standards for delivering high-resolution images and audio/video in an interoperable way, served here via Cantaloupe and viewed via Mirador.
- irIIIFService¶
An in-house IIIF Presentation API implementation designed to work with our DSpace and Fedora content models.
- MAGPIE¶
Metadata Assignment GUI Providing Ingest and Export App. Our primary in-house tool for ingesting SAF-modeled data into Fedora.
- OAKTrust¶
Texas A&M University’s open access institutional repository, built on DSpace, used to collect, preserve, and share the scholarly output of the University and its partners.
- OCR¶
Optical Character Recognition. Automated extraction of machine-readable text from images of printed material.
- OJS¶
Open Journal Systems. The platform (via our partnership with the TDL) used to launch, host, and manage open-access journals published at Texas A&M.
- ORCID¶
Open Researcher and Contributor ID. A persistent identifier for individual researchers, used to disambiguate authors and link them to their scholarly output.
- RAG¶
Retrieval-Augmented Generation. A technique that combines a language model with a search/ retrieval step over a document collection, used to support advanced querying of digital collections.
- ROR¶
Research Organization Registry. A persistent identifier for research institutions, used in OJS to identify author affiliations.
- SAF¶
Simple Archive Format. A DSpace-defined file/folder structure for batch importing items and their metadata, commonly generated with our SAF Creator tool.
- SAGE¶
One of the delivery systems used to serve cultural heritage collections built on Fedora.
- Spotlight¶
A Blacklight-based tool used to build online exhibits from digital collections.
- Strawberry Field¶
An Archipelago descriptive metadata field made up of several individual Archipelago fields combined together.
- TDL¶
Texas Digital Library. A consortium the Libraries partner with to host and support open-access journal publishing.
- TWIG¶
The template engine Archipelago uses to extract metadata from an ADO’s JSON and render it for display.
- WCAG¶
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The standard we design digital collections and exhibits against to meet ADA Title II accessibility requirements.