Acronyms are the bane of any discipline/organization, but they come in handy as abbreviations – even if one can’t always remember what they stand for. In the case of ERI (Earth Research Institute), there aren’t many people who can explain how (never mind why) CSL (Computer Systems Laboratory) evolved into ERI over ~25 years and what the intervening acronyms stood for.
Fortunately, Geography’s web master and Senior Artist, Susan Baumgart (1998 – 2005), spent a lot of time tracking down the history of the Department of Geography and its relationship to other research entities on the UCSB campus: “In 1988, Jeff Dozier and Ray Smith reorganized the earth science component of an organized research unit named Computer Systems Laboratory (started in 1972 under Engineering) into the Computer Systems Laboratory/Center for Remote Sensing and Environmental Optics (CSL/CRSEO), which, in 1995, was renamed Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS); Ray Smith was the first Director (1988-1996); Catherine Gautier became Director in 1996; Dave Siegel was appointed Director in 2002” (source).
ERI was formed in July of 2011 through the merger of the Institute for Crustal Studies (ICS) and the Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS). Doug Burbank (then Director of ICS; Chair of Earth Science) and Dave Siegel worked together to merge the two units. Coming up with an acronym for such an entity was a challenge, so the name was voted on by all of the participants, and, fortunately, the temptation to call the merger “CRICESS” was overcome.
Technically, an acronym is only an acronym if you pronounce it as one word (like “laser” or “scuba”); if you spell out the letters, it’s an “initialism” (like FBI or HTML). ERI seems to be both (see Wikipedia: Acronym). CRSEO (Center for Remote Sensing and Environmental Optics) may also have been a swinger in this regard, insofar as it was commonly referred to as “Crazy-O.”
Pete Peterson, now a Scientific Programmer in the Department of Geography who, previously, was a developer of GUS (the Grand Unified System – campus-wide data base) and, before then, a researcher who worked at ERI with Catherine Gautier and Dave Siegel, has experienced each stage of the morphing of CSL into ERI: “When I was an undergraduate in 1984, I had a work study job with Ray Smith at CSL (Computer Systems Lab; primarily Ray Smith and Jeff Dozier). Then came CRSEO (Crazy-O), the Center for Remote Sensing and Environmental Optics (adding some more PI’s), and then came ICESS (Institute for Computational Earth System Science, pronounced “ISIS”) which, when merged with the Institute for Crustal Studies, became ERI (Earth Research Institute).” He also pronounces ERI as EERIE – and, indeed, it is, whether or not it’s an acronym.
Article by Bill Norrington, with a lot of help from Pete Peterson and Kathy Scheidemen (MSO of ERI).
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