Emerging terms: 'buzz' tags with highest recency score (RS) over last 52 weeks

The Wayback Machine is a digital time capsule created by the Internet Archive non-profit organization, based in San Francisco, California. It is maintained with content from Alexa Internet. This service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time - what the Archive calls a "three dimensional index." Internet Archive bought the domain waybackmachine.org for their own site. It is currently in beta test. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Wayback Machine)

VuFind is an open source library search engine that allows users to search and browse beyond the resources of a traditional OPAC. Developed by Villanova University, version 1.0 was released in July 2010 after two years in beta. VuFind operates with a simple, Google-like interface and offers flexible keyword searching. While most commonly used for searching catalog records, VuFind can be extended to search other library resources including but not limited to: locally cached journals, digital library items, and institutional repository and bibliography. The software is also modular and highly configurable, allowing implementers to choose system components to best fit their needs. As of March 2012, a total of 64 institutions are running live instances of Vufind including the Georgia Tech Library, the London School of Economics, the National Library of Ireland, Yale University, and the DC Public Library. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: VuFind)

A virtual learning environment (VLE) is a system designed to support teaching and learning in an educational setting, as distinct from a Managed Learning Environment (MLE), where the focus is on management.A VLE will normally work over the Internet and provide a collection of tools such as those for assessment (particularly of types that can be marked automatically, such as multiple choice), communication, uploading of content, return of students' work, peer assessment, administration of student groups, collecting and organizing student grades, questionnaires, tracking tools, etc. New features in these systems include wikis, blogs, RSS and 3D virtual learning spaces. VLEs are often used in schools and other educational establishments in order to make the learning experience more interactive. While originally created for distance education, VLEs are now most often used to supplement traditional face to face classroom activities, commonly known as Blended Learning. These systems usually run on servers, to serve the course to students Multimedia and/or web pages. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Virtual learning environment)

A virtual research environment (VREs) or virtual laboratory is an online system helping researchers collaborate. Features usually include collaboration support (forums and wikis), document hosting, and some discipline-specific tools, such as data analysis, visualisation, or simulation management. In some instances, publication management, and teaching tools such as presentations and slides may be included. VREs have become important in fields where research is primarily carried out in teams which span institutions and even countries: the ability to easily share information and research results is valuable. The concept of the VRE was studied by UK funding agency JISC in 2010 which highlighted issues such as researcher involvement in VRE design, sustainability, and consideration of the project as primarily one of community building rather than technology. The report also noted synonyms such as "collaborative e-research community", "collaboratory" and "virtual research community". JISC funded development of a number of VREs under its "Virtual research environment programme" from 2004 to 2011. In Australia, e-Research body NeCTAR has funding for a "virtual laboratory" program to be allocated in 2011. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Virtual research environment)

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a specification to establish communication between devices and a host controller (usually a personal computer), developed and invented by Ajay Bhatt, while working for Intel. USB has effectively replaced a variety of interfaces such as serial and parallel ports. USB can connect computer peripherals such as mice, keyboards, digital cameras, printers, personal media players, flash drives, Network Adapters, and external hard drives. For many of those devices, USB has become the standard connection method. USB was designed for personal computers, but it has become commonplace on other devices such as smartphones, PDAs and video game consoles, and as a power cord. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Universal Serial Bus)

In computing, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. In popular usage and in many technical documents and verbal discussions it is often incorrectly used as a synonym for URI. The best-known example of the use of URLs is for the addresses of web pages on the World Wide Web, such as http://www.example.com/. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Uniform Resource Locator)

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 109,000 characters covering 93 scripts, a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts). As of 2011, the most recent major revision of Unicode is Unicode 6.0. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Unicode)

Open educational resources (OER) are "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research." Being a production and dissemination mode, OER are not involved in awarding degrees nor in providing academic or administrative support to students. However, OER materials are beginning to get integrated into open and distance education. Some OER producers have involved themselves in social media to increase their content visibility and reputation. OER include different kinds of digital assets. Learning content includes courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals. Tools include software that supports the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content, searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities. Implementation resources include intellectual property licenses that govern open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content. They also include materials on best practices such as stories, publication, techniques, methods, processes, incentives, and distribution. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Open Educational Resources)

TIFF (originally standing for Tagged Image File Format) is a file format for storing images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and both amateur and professional photographers in general. As of 2009, it is under the control of Adobe Systems. Originally created by the company Aldus for use with what was then called "desktop publishing", the TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications, by publishing and page layout applications, by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition and other applications. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: TIFF)