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Resources and News for Information Professionals
ResourceShelf is Compiled & Edited By Gary Price, MLIS Librarian Director of Online Information Resources, Ask.com Editor and Compiler, The ResourceShelf Editor and Compiler, DocuTicker
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Thursday, February 09, 2006
Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
Gray or grey literature has long been considered the proverbial needle in the haystack. It is commonly defined as any documentary material that is not commercially published and is typically composed of technical reports, working papers, business documents, and conference proceedings. The greatest challenges involved with these items are the process of identification, since there is limited indexing, and acquisition, since availability is usually marred with uncertainty. Added to this is the absence of editorial control, raising questions about authenticity and reliability. Yet despite these considerations, gray literature is continually referenced in scholarly articles and dissertations and therefore remains an issue that academic librarians must contend with. -- Gray literature: Resources for locating unpublished research, Brian Matthews, C&RL News, March 2004; Vol. 65, No. 3Since I'm always on the lookout for unusual items to post on DocuTicker, gray lit repositories are an ongoing source of joy. When I stumble across one that is particularly fruitful, I try to keep an eye on it one way or another, so I'll know when new content has been added. In the above-referenced article, Matthews provides a great introduction to the world of gray lit, with annotated links to articles, directories, discussion lists and miscellaneous resources, including a few of the biggies such as: + DTIC's Public STINET (Scientific and Technical Information Network) + GrayLIT Network, from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information + The University of Maryland's Virtual Technical Reports Center, basically a large alphabetical list of links to institutions that make "full-text reports, or searchable extended abstracts of their technical reports" available on the Web + Corporate technical report servers, such as those from HP Labs, IBM and Microsoft + ZDNet's White Paper Directory, offering IT-oriented content + Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library + The New York Academy of Medicine's bimontly Gray Literature Report provides pointers to new content in the field of public health. The world of gray lit is not limited to hard science and technology content. You read about the Social Science Research Network in this very space last November. Other fishing holes include: + Working Papers of Political Science, which maintains links to academic political science department working paper sites (and provides a search engine) + RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), which offers content from 53 different countries + Education-line, "a freely accessible database of the full text of conference papers, working papers and electronic literature which supports educational research, policy and practice," from the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds (UK) + The various Electronic Theses and Dissertation collections that comprise the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations + A particular favorite of mine: the Faculty Research Working Paper Series at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government You may or may not know that the field of library and information science has its own preprint archive. "E-LIS is an open access archive for scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, on Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related areas." As of Tuesday evening this week, the repository contained 3,266 fully searchable full-text documents; submissions come from researchers all over the world. Some noteworthy recent additions: + Repeat Visits to Vivisimo.com: Implications for Successive Web Searching + Affective and Cognitive Information Behavior: Interaction Effects in Internet Use + Google Scholar : The New Generation of Citation Indexes + Virtual Reference for Video Collections: System Infrastructure, User Interface and Pilot User Study You can sign up to receive e-mail alerts when new content is added to E-LIS; there is also an RSS feed. |
