Quarterly Newsletter
Vol. 9, No. 2, 2000
ISSN 1389-1812
Launch GL-Compendium Gateway
New Frontiers in Grey Literature - Conference Report
Letter from the Editor: GreyNet Editorial and Advisory Board
Grey Alert #1 - Open Government Canada
Walk Through, The Grey Link... "PowerPoint Presentation"
Annual Subscription: 20 Euros / 20 USDollars
Editorial Address
Launch GL-Compendium Gateway
A Netbased Directory of Grey Literature Collections
Today marks a milestone both for GreyNet and for the entire field of Grey Literature.
Today librarians and information workers worldwide can log onto the Internet and within minutes, they can submit details of their special collections of grey literature.
In so doing, they will create global awareness of their collections of reports, dissertations, preprints, working papers, country profiles, research memoranda, feasibility studies, among the 100's of other types of grey literature both in print and electronic format.
These same librarians, documentalists, and archivists on all levels of government, academics, business and industry will now be able to promote their collections of grey literature to all internet users for direct search, access, and retrieval.
If you have a collection(s) of grey literature, please take a moment to visit the new GL-Compendium Gateway, http://www.mcbup.com/glc
Your contribution to this unique, netbased resource is greatly appreciated!
"GL-Compendium, a unique networked resource in and for grey literature, will not only act to control information overflow but will, at the same time, confront and deal with information underuse."
Editor GL-Compendium
New Frontiers in Grey Literature
Report on GL'99, the Fourth International Conference on Grey Literature
GL'99 gathered some 105 people from 22 countries; not quite half were authors or co-authors of presentations. It was the 4th in a series of biennial conferences alternating between Europe and the US, founded by Dominic Farace under the aegis of his GreyNet, Grey Literature Network Service. For librarians, who made up perhaps a quarter of the attendees, it was an exciting opportunity to discuss issues and solutions to what are very much 'our' issues with people with shared concerns who aren't part of our daily interactions. This is especially the case for academic librarians, whose perspectives differed significantly from special librarian's. The heterogeneity of the conference is suggested by the list of sponsors: BIOSIS, JST (Japan Science and Technology Corporation), MCB University Press, NASA, and the U.S. National Library of Education. Major database producers & consumers, then, along with commercial publishers and producers and consumers of large quantities of what we were soon used to calling 'GL'. In formal terms, the conference's definition of Grey Literature was so broad as to include a large part of what college and research libraries hold: That which is produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishers. Taken literally, that means university press monographs and journals of learned societies (those not sold to mega- publishers, at least) would be Grey Literature. In the event, however, the presenters and discussants focused on the concerns that drew academic librarians to attend: material produced by researchers and institutions for limited distribution. Even with a narrower definition, there were a great many issues raised.
The program was organized around three themes:
|
Global Assessment of Grey Literature:
A Brave New World of Topics, Formats, and Uses. |
|
Publishing and Archiving Electronic Grey Literature:
From Production to Full-Text Storage, Retrieval and Distribution. |
|
Copyright and Grey Literature:
Authorship, Ownership, and Property Rights. |
Creating buckets of information
Two of the best papers came from systems designers. Michael L. Nelson of NASA's Langley Research Center, writing with Kurt Maly from Old Dominion University, talked about "Preserving the Pyramid of STI Using Buckets". Concerned that even when research is formally published, the journal article is at best an abstract of a much larger body of data and programs, Nelson and Maly are developing a metadata system to link together, in archivally-secure ways, articles, conference papers, technical reports, databases, and project-specific software, so that future researchers will be able to retrieve far more than at present of what underlies the scientific literature. Further, they plan 'intelligent-agent' features such that 'buckets' will create links to other buckets on bases of common authorship, shared topics, or shared methods and instruments; researchers will then be led to a wider network of similar works.
Automating link management
Jens Vigen, one of several attendees from CERN, the birthplace of the WorldWideWeb, spoke (wonderfully, without text or illustrations) of his work with Elena Lodi of the University of Siena on "Link Managers for Grey Literature". CERN works with Los Alamos in handling the great mass of physics pre-prints. As 200 articles arrive each day, with, say, 20 references each, some 4000 citations must be input daily. Vigen and Lodi are trying to automate the process of matching and linking published articles to the pre-prints already online, which raises many questions (most especially of permanence of URL's for e-journal articles.) Vigen began by observing that the general hype for a web-based 'digital library' overlooks the fact that hard-copy libraries are based on 'shelf organization' to co-locate related works, which, of course, facilitates browsing. Vigen quoted a study that found an average of 18 mouse clicks between two related web pages -- far too clumsy a method for research. Hence the attempt to automate links.
Copyright issues
The international quality of the conference meant that copyright issues were addressed in new and different ways. Most U.S. discussion of current copyright belabors how our library practices are changed and constrained as U.S. law comes into conformity with Europe. The European presenters, however --and some from the USA! -- discussed what kinds of protections are routine there, but are lacking here-- such as the right of a creator to withdraw a work. Michael Seadle, from Michigan State University Library, gave an excellent talk on "Grey Copyrights for Grey Literature: National Assumptions, International Rights", which, with well-chosen illustrations, made clear many large and unresolved issues regarding control of intellectual property, print and digital. Dave Davis from the Copyright Clearance Center which he semi-facetiously styled as "a reproduction rights organization" gave an excellent and witty overview of the many and varied rights contained in what we mistakenly think of as discrete books. His fantastic and intimidating 'bundle of rights' diagram (Jackson Pollock with a law degree!) made it clear that digitizing books, articles and technical reports is not simple. A novel, for example, will have potentially differently held rights to translate, serialize, dramatize, broadcast and digitize, among other. And even these have multiple facets -- movies vs. television, CD-ROM vs. Internet, etc. The illustrators in a book very likely are "owned" by someone -- a "corporation" is a legal person -- other than the book's author and publisher. Some "chapters" in Virginia Tech dissertations are previously published articles, and some authors could not obtain rights to post their own work in their dissertation -- whose online version may have a citation in place of a chapter! Dave Davis posed the question of how copying GL -- as with CCC license -- turns un- or semi-published works into "commercial literature". Could CCC licenses measure an "impact factor" à la ISI's citation indexing? Davis quoted Mark Twain: "Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. Whenever a copyright is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble." ¹
Other topics discussed
Beside the formal papers and mini-papers in 'breakout sessions', GL'99 had product presentations by vendors and lunches grouped by topics.
Librarians were particularly interested in the massive schemes -- not least by Farace's own GreyNet -- to make it easier and faster to gain access to more GL, including self-posted writings by those without institutional affiliations. How would such work -- referred to by sociologist of science Helmut Artus in his paper as "dirty grey literature" with no bibliographic qualities at all -- be filtered by users? This question showed an interesting gap between special librarians -- who did the searching themselves to package results for clients -- and academic librarians, who could too easily see the impact on uncritical undergraduates of a web full of good, bad, and ugly research indiscriminately presented by aggregators and engines.
Another distinction that became evident during the conference related to ephemerality and obscurity. How much GL was the larval stage of published research, necessary to identify in the interest of speed and currency, and how much research of enduring value never will be published beyond the original, GL report?
Not addressed was the related question -- posed, for example, by U.S. environmental-impact studies, of how much research that used to be published by museum occasional papers and other well-controlled sources is now found in agency branch office contract research reports, far outside the view of libraries?
Note
1. Mark Twain: Mark Twain's Notebook, May 23, 1903
Conference Report by
Gregory A. Finnegan, Tozzer Library, Harvard University
Reprint from C&RL News, December 1999/909
With Permission from ALA, The American Library Association.
Letter from the Editor
Grey Literature Network Service
March 2000
Dear Colleague,
Currently, I am involved in the process of identifying individuals, who would be willing to serve on GreyNet's Editorial and Advisory Board (EAB). In January of this year, GreyNet moved from a subscription to a membership base. This change, while long in coming was quite opportune.
GreyNet was established eight years ago in order to promote and support the work of authors, researchers, librarians, and intermediaries in the field of Grey Literature. Its catchment is global, spanning the sectors of government, academics, business and industry. GreyNet has engineered and maintains information resources in print and electronic format, and convenes national and international forums spearheading research and development in this field.
If you would like to serve on GreyNet's Editorial and Advisory Board or if you would like to recommend someone for the EAB, please contact me at your earliest convenience. Candidates should be actively involved in some area of grey literature and hold GreyNet membership.
I look forward to your reply, and remain
With kind regards,
Dr. Dominic J. Farace, Head
greynet@greynet.org
P.S. If you do not yet hold GreyNet Membership, I invite you to join us today!
http://www.greynet.org/join/membership.html
|
Grey Alert #1
On March 10-11, a powerful new freedom of information coalition in Canada was born. People representing 25 groups gathered in Toronto to sign on to Open Government Canada, with a pledge towards building an organization to educate Canadians about public information laws and to push for better access.
"We're ecstatic that Canada will finally have a unified public voice demanding greater government transparency", said Boni Fox, co-chair of the newly minted OGC and president of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
A 12-member steering committee representing groups such as the Canadian Library Association, Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, Canadian Newspaper Association, Democracy Watch and B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association will take over OGC and report back within 12 months on a new structure, board and funding opportunities.
http://www.opengovernmentcanada.org
Walk Through, The Grey Link
PowerPoint Presentation
By far, the two most frequently asked questions FAQs over the past 8 years has been "What is grey literature?" followed by "What is GreyNet?". In the early '90s, a gopher file was used to help field these questions and this was soon replaced by the advancements of the web. GreyNet has now produced a 19 frame PowerPoint presentation with color, animation, and sound bytes to get its message even better across. If you would like a copy, please email greynet@greynet.org
To view the presentation please go to
Walk Through, The Grey Link
NewsBriefNews
