Word of the Day

: June 28, 2015

cybrarian

noun sye-BRAIR-ee-un

What It Means

: a person whose job is to find, collect, and manage information that is available on the World Wide Web

cybrarian in Context

The university's cybrarians maintain libraries of Web sites pertaining to specific fields of study.

"Mike Tromblee is on a mission. The new Redwood Area School District cybrarian and media center specialist wants to take technology education to the next level in the classroom." - Troy Krause, Redwood Falls (Maine) Gazette, August 30, 2010

Did You Know?

We've been using librarian for the people who manage libraries since at least the beginning of the 18th century, and the word was used for scribes and copyists even earlier than that. Cybrarian, on the other hand, is much newer; its earliest documented use is from 1991. Librarian combines library (itself from liber, the Latin word for book) and the noun suffix -an, meaning "one specializing in." When people wanted a word for a person who performed duties similar to those of a librarian by using information from the Internet, they went a step further and combined cyber-, meaning "of, relating to, or involving computers or a computer network," with librarian to produce the new cybrarian.