Wednesday Search Challenge (Feb 17, 2010) - Finding a definition

I was doing a bit of reading this morning about the history of monasteries, monks and early libraries when I ran across this word:

     extra-claustral 

Can you figure out what it means?  (And no, it's not a misspelled word.)

I'm interested in both the 'straightforward' meaning of the word and the ways in which it's used metaphorically.

Tomorrow I'll write a bit about the obvious strategies for searching out the definitions of words, and how to cope when the obvious methods don't quite work so well.