I was in a meeting during the week where publishing was being discussed. After a while it became clear that we would have to qualify what we meant by publishing for it to be a usable word in the conversation: people had different views of what was and was not publishing in our changing context.
In digital library conversations, we continually have to qualify the words we mean to avoid confusion. Think of archive which is now used in a variety of related but different senses, or of repository. Similarly, we may have to qualify content management or asset management in some conversations. And that is before thinking at all of what a learning object is, or a portal.
Service is used in a specialized sense (a machine accessible piece of functionality on the network) and a general sense. We fall back on a word like content as format lines become blurred.
This unformed vocabulary is symptomatic of ongoing change …
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