An interesting note on GL and Libraries…

NLE ON BOARD AS AN ASSOCIATE MEMBER OF GREYNET AND CURRENT GL8 SPONSOR
GreyNet, 6 September 2006

The National Library of Education, a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Education has become an Associate Member of GreyNet http://www.greynet.org and in so doing has returned to the GL-Conference Series as one of its main Sponsors. http://www.textrelease.com/textreleasehome/gl8sponsors.html.

The following is by guest blogger John Willinsky.

John is a Professor at the Department of Language and Literacy Education at UBC, and the Public Knowledge Project.

Michael Lines has asked Professor Willinsky to comment on the open access movement and the changing sense of what it means to publish in relation to scholarly inquiry.

Once there was a way to tell the grey literature from what had been clearly and cleanly published in black and white. It was all in the font and binding. For the better part of the twentieth century, the grey literature was typically . . . [more]

I have but two small tidbits to contribute to Grey Lit week. Institutional repositories and academic institutions were touched on earlier this week, but I would like to mention our own effort here at Dal Law. A source from our collection was mentioned several weeks back on Slaw, but the whole thing is here. This is a list of publications by members or graduate students here at the Faculty of Law. Preliminary talks amongst the interested parties at Dal have already occured to create a wider repository/electronic press across the entire university, but this is our own small . . . [more]

I’ll be interested to see what John has to say about how publishing is changing. Clearly, with Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and even Book 2.0, the changes are coming fast and thick. We’ve seen that a definition of GL is a moving target, and possibly the lines between GL and other forms of publishing, such as they are, will blur to the point that it will not be useful to distinguish. But announcing the demise of the publishing industry as we know it may be premature, as Slawers have noted.

I started this week thinking that one of . . . [more]

My favourite place for finding government publications and press releases which have disappeared from their respective department websites is the Ontario Legislative Library catalogue. One can run a simple search from the entry page: . . . [more]

Like many others, I’m learning a lot from our Grey Lit week. Thanks to everyone who’s contributed, and the outside expertise brought in by Michael Lines.

One topic that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the effective collection of presentation materials, including in-house presentation series, presentations for marketing purposes, and CLE. From internal training, to the re-purposing of marketing content, to networking and business development, there are so many different ways in which an organization can derive value from these collections. In terms of investing staff time, there should be little question, presentations can be some of . . . [more]

The following is by guest bloggers Jim Suderman and Hannelore Dekeyser.

Jim Suderman is a member of the Canadian research team in the UBC-based InterPARES 2 research project directed by Dr. Luciana DurantiHe has worked as an archivist for over twenty years in Manitoba and Ontario, and with electronic records for the past eight years. He is currently manager of records management services for the City of Toronto.

Hannelore Dekeyser is a legal researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law & ICT (K.U.Leuven, Belgium) where she has been working on the legal aspects of digital archiving since 2002During this . . . [more]

Authenticity is a concern in courts, where any document offered as evidence must be free of tampering. Inasmuch as GL might be evidence, it would also need to be authenticated in some way. . . . [more]

The following is by guest blogger Susan Salo, head of CISTI’s London NIC (NRC Information Centre)Susan has been on the CISTI’s Electronic Resources Committee for three years, and is also on the Collections Advisory Committee.. Theme week leader Michael Lines asked Susan to comment on how Science and Technology GL is collected at CISTI, so that we in the legal world can learn by analogy from those fields, both in terms of the actual sources of GL that have been established, and where possible the policies and background that has made Science and Technology a leader in access to . . . [more]

In my view, the definition of grey literature should include one too often overlooked source of research about the law, namely the reports of law reform institutes.

The Diana M. Priestly Law Library at the University of Victoria in British Columbia has a page of links to law reform commissions in various countries. The University of Calgary Law Library provides a slightly different list.

Among the finding tools are:

• The British Columbia Law Institute has created a searchable law reform database that indexes over 7000 law reform materials from common law jurisdictions around the world
• The WorldLII Law

For this part of the discussion, I want to outline my approach to finding GL, which I hope will make a little more concrete what I mean when I talk about the semi-archival quality of GL.

Some of this goes back to the creation of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, which came out of a CBA effort, the final report of which is a fine example of GL.

Recommendation 52 advocates setting up the Forum, in part to “[collect] in a systematic way information relating the system for administering civil justice” (p.78), which basically turns out to me a . . . [more]

Michael Lines and Kathryn Arbuckle have both pointed out the difficulty of collecting print copies of much grey lit, and yet library users are reluctant to pore over screeds on screens. Might it not be sensible to explore print on demand as at least a partial solution. (I’m referring to the abililty of libraries or other information centres to quickly print and bind digital material, not the many “vanity” presses that now offer authors inexpensive print runs of their works — those these, too, may have their place: think about a well-done law school casebook printed off site.)

All the . . . [more]