For me, any information about Paris HiltonBTW any encyclopedia that claims to match Brittanica and has articles like this has a wondrous sense of irony. is too much information.

Too Much Information! BIALL 2007 Conference Call For Papers

‘Too Much Information!’ is the theme for the 38th BIALL Annual Study Conference and Exhibition which will take place Sheffield City Hall, Thursday 14th – Saturday 16th June 2007. BIALL has issued a call for papers.

The central theme is information overload, a major concern throughout the profession and a problem for all those we serve. How can we help them . . . [more]

Given the week’s theme of grey lit, it seemed only right to pursue that colour’s manifestations, shall we say.

I acknowledge a serious debt to web zen. (Okay, okay: I copied them. Picky picky picky.)

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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]

WebCite is “an academic project, hosted at the University of Toronto / University Health Network's Centre for Global eHealth Innovation” the aim of which is to cache web pages cited by academic writers and to provide not merely a stable URL but long-term, if not permanent, access to the cited web material.

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]

In a letter to the Co-Chairs of Access Copyright, the Canadian Library Association uses forceful language to express concerns about Access Copyright's Captain Copyright website initiative.

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]