I am back from my vacation in Maine. I did not do much blogging while I was there, but I got a good portion of an article written. I will be spending this week in Massachusetts before heading back to Lithuania next Monday.

I came across a WordPress plugin today that I thought I would share with other bibliobloggers. It is an acronym replacement tool that will automatically wrap any acronyms in your posts with a tag that supplies the meaning of your acronym. For example, you can mouse over the acronyms SBL or DtrH in this post, and a pop-up box will tell you what they mean. The plugin comes with a number of acronyms defined, but it is very easy to add things that it does not have and tailor it to your needs.

I think this is one of the ways that we can make our scholarship more accessible. Often, we talk in jargon. Jargon is helpful because it reduces to short hand many of the things that scholars discuss on a regular basis. That makes it easier to communicate between scholars, but shuts out those who are not a part of the guild. This tool allows us to keep speaking in technical language, but allows non-specialists to follow along more easily. Now I can talk about JEDP all I want without having to pause to define it. Of course, the definition that pops up is short, but it will at least help. Just part of my on-going commitment to Open Source Scholarship ™.

Naturally, this will only be helpful to you if you blog with WordPress. For those of you who use other tools, I apologize for wasting your time.