Resourcefully: Grey Matters

ABSTRACT

It won’t do to ignore it, though it’s hard to collect it. In this instalment of Resourcefully, a discussion of the rapidly expanding and increasingly important world of grey literature. Exploring the potential for library-led investment and preservation, and the social justice opportunity to acknowledge a constellation of creators providing a wide variety of valuable, unconventional content, we take inspiration from the past to plot a course forward. Grey literature allows us to ask a big question: How can we learn from past library failures in supporting and preserving independent open access publishing moving forward?

KEYWORDS:

• Grey literature
• digital preservation
• collective collections

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Lisa Peet, “Budgeting for the New Normal: Libraries Respond to COVID-19 Funding Constraints,” Library Journal, https://www.libraryjournal.com?detailStory=budgeting-for-the-new-normal-libraries-respond-to-covid-19-funding-constraints (accessed October 19, 2020).

² V Alberani, PDC Pietrangeli, AMR Mazza, “The Use of Grey Literature in Health Sciences: A Preliminary Survey,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 78, no. 4 (1990): 358363.

³ Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and Najko Jahn, “Open is Not Forever: A Study of Vanished Open Access Journals,” (2020): arXiv:2008.11933.

⁴ Carolyn Seaman, Robert L. Nord, Philippe Kruchten, and Ipek Ozkaya, “Technical Debt: Beyond Definition to Understanding Report on the Sixth International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt,” Software Engineering Notes 40, no. 2 (2015): 32–34.

⁵ T. Root, “Show Me Science Advanced-Neuroscience: The Brain Understood,” The Video Librarian 34, no. 1 (2019): 1–1.