The hardest part of any project is devising a name for the output. The second hardest thing is devising a name that can also be expressed as a memorable acronym.
I think one of the most successful instances I encountered was the CAMiLEON Project. This acronym unpacks into Creative Archiving at Michigan and Leeds Emulating the Old on the New. It brilliantly manages to include the names of both sponsoring Institutions, and accurately describes the work of the project, and still end up as a memorable one-word acronym. Even the word itself resembled “chameleon” of course, a certain lizard which the project quite naturally used as its logo. When you consider the project itself was about Emulation – a particular approach to digital preservation that involves “copying” IT environments – then that emblem is strikingly apposite to the meaning of the work.
From AIDA to AOR toolkit
I realised that the new AIDA name and acronym could never possibly tick all those boxes. In February we put it out to the social media arena, offering prizes to anyone who could help us devise something suitable. The dilemma was expressed here. Meanwhile I tried making use of various online acronym generation tools, and found myself getting into an even worse mess of linguistic spaghetti.
In the end I decided to abandon acronyms, and instead settled for:
The Assessing Organisational Readiness (AOR) Toolkit
Acceptable abbreviations of this name would include AOR or AORT. AOR is an acronym already – it can mean “Album-Oriented Rock” or “Area Of Responsibility”. The second one is not entirely unsuitable for this toolkit.
Rationale for AOR toolkit:
- This is simpler and shorter than Assessing Organisational Readiness for Managing Digital Content or similar
- It captures the three most important functions of the toolkit (the “digital” side of it is almost irrelevant, you could say)
- It includes “readiness”, which the old AIDA missed, and which is central to the toolkit
- It allows users to make other interpretations of what “managing digital content” means to them (e.g. it could mean preservation, but it could also mean providing access), without closing off these meanings
I do wonder though if “cute” project acronyms have had their day now. When I was doing web-archiving for the JISC, almost every project had one around 2006-2007, and we ended up with rather forced constructions such as this one.