july05b.indd Pat Sulouff, Suzanne Bell, Judi Briden, Stephanie Frontz, and Ann Marshall Learning about grey literature by interviewing subject librarians A study at the University of Rochester During the 2003–04 academic year, staff at the University of Rochester (UR) River Campus Libraries studied how faculty mem­ bers find, use, and produce grey literature to do their scholarly work. We formed a research team that included an anthropologist, librar­ ians, a graphic designer, computer scientist, programmer, and cataloger, and we learned the methods of work­practice study.1 With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we then interviewed 25 faculty members in art and art history, economics, modern languages, linguistics, physics, and political science with the hope that what we learned would be useful in designing additions or modifications to our institutional repository.2 As we conducted and analyzed the in­ terviews from this study, we discovered that some important questions about grey litera­ ture remained. What exactly constitutes grey literature for UR’s faculty in today’s digital world? To what extent do our faculty mem­ bers create and use grey literature, and might that material be deposited in our institutional repository? We also knew that the information gained from the departments studied under the aegis of the grant was necessarily limited, and we were interested in somehow expanding the reach of the study. We wanted to know which types of grey literature are most prevalent in all the disciplines and departments on our campus, not just the ones represented in our study. Could we tap into the expertise of sub­ ject librarians who work with faculty to inform our understanding of the grey literature used in other academic departments? Ultimately, we hoped that what we discov­ ered would be useful in providing support to faculty who wished to make their grey litera­ ture available via our institutional repository. To learn more, the fi ve subject librarians who were part of the larger research team (the authors of this paper) interviewed all of the River Campus Libraries subject librarians on the topic of grey literature. Getting started To begin, the five of us questioned each other about our own faculty members’ use of grey literature to ensure that we were asking the right questions and to get a sense of how best to conduct the interviews. Interviewing subject librarians was important for several reasons. In our larger study, it was difficult to ask faculty some of the most basic questions regarding grey literature. Grey literature is not a term used by most faculty members. In addition, we found that faculty research, even within the same department, tends to be narrowly focused, making it a cumbersome and unreal­ istic task to get a general sense of the variety Pat Sulouff is head of the physics-optics-astronomy library, e-mail: psulouff @library.rochester.edu; Suzanne Bell is economics/data librarian and University of Rochester research projects coordinator, e -mail: suzanneb@library.rochester.edu; Judi Briden is digital librarian for public services, e-mail: jbriden@library. rochester.edu; Stephanie Frontz is head of the Art/ Music Library, e-mail: sfrontz@library.rochester.edu; and Ann Marshall is reference librarian and political science bibliographer, e -mail: amarshall@librar y. rochester.edu at the Universit y of Rochester ’s River Campus Libraries © 2005 Pat Sulouff, Suzanne Bell, Judi Briden, Stephanie Frontz, and Ann Marshall C&RL News July/August 2005 510 http:rochester.edu mailto:sfrontz@library.rochester.edu http:rochester.edu mailto:suzanneb@library.rochester.edu http:library.rochester.edu and range of grey literature from faculty members only. By contrast, our librarian col­ leagues were readily accessible to us, already had some familiarity with grey literature and with our project, and were enthusiastic about exploring the topic with us. While most librarians are familiar with the term grey literature, we discovered that there was much that subject librarians did not know about grey literature, especially in disciplines other than their own. We all found it useful to pool our knowledge and make cross­disciplin­ ary comparisons. For consistency’s sake, we provided a standard definition at the beginning of each interview. We defined grey literature as, “that which is produced by government, academ­ ics, business, and industries, both in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishing interests and where publishing is not the primary activity of the organization.”3 In each interview we asked the same three questions: • Do you know of materials in your area that would fall into the grey literature category? • Do you get requests from faculty for grey literature? If so, what do they request? • Has your interaction with grey literature changed within the past few years? If so, what do you think caused these changes? Participation in the interviews was entirely voluntary. There were no “right” or “wrong” answers. We simply wanted to know what subject librarians thought was important grey literature for their departments. Each interview was tape­recorded and lasted for 30 minutes or less. After each interview, the grey literature team prepared a written summary and asked the librarian we had interviewed to review the summary for any corrections or omissions, which were then incorporated into the final summary. Altogether, we interviewed 20 subject librarians who are responsible for 25 disciplines. In addition to interviewing subject librar­ ians, we met with staff in the Interlibrary Loan Department to ask about the grey literature requests they receive from faculty July/August 2005 511 C&RL News ample, theses and dissertations Table 1. Grey literature important are of prime importance to to multiple UR departments departments offering doctoral Type of grey literature Number of Departments Conference presentations and papers 17 Theses and dissertations 13 Datasets 6 Technical/research reports 5 Videos 4 Teaching materials 4 Government publications 4 Preprints 3 Working papers 2 Invited talks 2 Miscellaneous materials to supplement publication 2 Audio 2 members. These discussions were also a rich source of information. What we learned Faculty members and graduate students in all disciplines use a number of types of grey literature. The most prevalent types are listed in Table 1, which shows that theses and dis­ sertations are important to more than half the departments, as are conference presen­ tations and papers. Ten additional types of grey literature are significant to at least two departments, with datasets being important to six. At the other end of the spec­ trum are those types of grey lit­ erature that are significant to only one department, as shown in Table 2. A wide variety of subject areas is represented here through such items as linguists’ dictionaries and grammars, psychologists’ tests, and engineers’ patents and standards. While these same results would not be found at all institutions, the patterns seen here can provide in­ sight into another institution’s aca­ demic context. In our study, for ex­ programs. At other institutions, one might find sociologists with a strong research interest in datasets and historians who rely on images. In addition to learning more about the range and types of grey literature used, we discov­ ered that rather than working through their subject librarian, patrons often go directly to our Interlibrary Loan Department to obtain “grey” materials. For example, we learned that in­ terlibrary loan fills more and more requests for media such as DVDs, VHS, and audio fi les. Also, many interlibrary loan requests result in Internet links that can be passed on directly to requestors, and, not surprisingly, Google is used by the Interli­ brary Loan Department as a means of fi nding esoteric items. What is obvious is that one cannot make easy assumptions about grey literature. It takes on different forms in dif­ ferent departmental settings. For institutions supporting digital repositories, the lesson is threefold: • To achieve campus­wide acceptance, repositories need to accommodate a variety of types of grey literatures. Table 2. Grey literature unique to a single UR department Type of grey literature Association papers Department Anthropology /Sociology Images Art/Art History Research proposals Chemistry Theater and dance programs Dance Patents Engineering Standards Engineering Dictionaries and grammars Linguistics Tests Psychology C&RL News July/August 2005 512 Table 3. Types of grey literature associated with departments/disciplines Department or discipline RankingT1 Most common types of grey literatureT2 Art and Art History 1 Images, conference papers, theses and dissertations, videos, archival material Astronomy 3 Theses and dissertations, Astrophysical Data System materials, NASA reports, data, astronomical data catalogs Biology 3 Conference presentations and papers, sequence databases Brain and Cognitive Sciences 2 Invited research talks, videos, Cogprints, sign language bibliography Business 2 Working papers, theses and dissertations, datasets Chemistry 2 Research proposals and grant applications, conference presentations and papers Computer Science 1 Technical reports, conference proceedings, preprints, some datasets Dance 1 Videos of university and guest dance per­ formances, theater and dance programs Economics 1 Working papers, theses and dissertations, business school papers, datasets Education 1 Conference proceedings, research reports, theses and dissertations, teaching materi­ als, curriculum guides, psychological tests English 3 Conference papers, invited talks, teaching materials, bibliographies, unpublished studies and interviews Engineering 2 Patents, standards, conference proceedings, technical reports, theses and dissertations, U.S. Gov tech reports (EPA, DOE, etc.), corporate tech reports (HP, IBM, Microsoft) History 2 Conference papers, theses and disserta­ tions, government documents Laboratory for Laser Energetics 3 Technical reports; conference papers; data sets; theses and dissertations; pre­ prints and eprints; annual reports; bulletins and newsletters; house journals, manuals, and technical specifications and standards; bibliographies Linguistics 1 Dictionaries and grammars, audio and data to supplement published work, conference papers Mathematics and Statistics 3 Preprints, datasets (continued on next page) July/August 2005 513 C&RL News Table 3. Types of grey literature associated with departments/disciplines (continued) Department or discipline RankingT1 Most common types of grey literatureT2 Modern Languages and Cultures 2 Conference papers, theses and dissertations, government and inter­ national publications, association publications Music 1 Conference papers, theses and dissertation, video and audio of perform­ ances, musical society newsletters and bulletins Optics 3 Supplements to published work, company and lab reports (both in­house and published), military standards Philosophy 3 Conference papers, theses and disserta­ tions, teaching materials Physics 3 Theses and dissertations; ArXiv, SLAC, CERN eprints; government documents; reports and data from NASA, NIST, and national labs Political Science 1 Working papers; datasets; policy briefs; think tank, institute, and nonprofi t newsletters, reports, and statistics; government documents Psychology 2 Conference papers, tests, datasets, theses and dissertations Religion and Classics 1 Conference papers, theses, teaching materials, church papers, archival materials Sociology and Anthropology 3 Association papers, conference presentations, materials to supplement publications, theses and dissertations Women’s Studies 2 Conference papers; newsletters; research reports from nonprofi t, government, NGOs, international agencies; conference proceedings Writing Program 3 Curricular materials, conference papers, ERIC materials T1- Ranking refers to the likelihood that the department is a good source of submissions to our university’s digital repository. Departments with a #1 ranking are the ones that we plan to approach first. T2- Types of grey literature that appear in italics are those that are most likely to be submitted by our own faculty into our university’s digital repository. C&RL News July/August 2005 514 • Interest in various types of materials may be unique to a discipline or have a large cross­disciplinary audience. • Subject specialist librarians are an impor­ tant source of expertise about grey literature. Table 3 represents the distillation of all the discussions with our subject librarians and shows the major types of grey literature used by the UR departments. Putting information into this tabular form was useful in a number of ways: • Common themes become apparent. For example, theses and dissertations are almost universal types of grey literature. • Specialized and unusual types of material also stand out. Who would have thought that foreign government publications were so signifi ­ cant to the modern languages department? • To be honest, for the subject librarians, compiling all the information into this exten­ sive chart was gratifying. Since subject librarians do not fi ll many direct requests for grey literature, they tend to believe that they are not very knowledgeable about it. On the contrary, we find that subject librarians have a depth of knowledge about the grey literature used in their own disciplines that is extensive, hard won, and valuable. This knowledge was easily increased by the sharing that occurred as part of the interviewing and debriefi ng processes. Lastly, and of most importance for one of our immediate goals, it gives us a guide to the principal types of material that we may expect the various disciplines to deposit into DSpace, our institutional repository. Implications for institutional repositories Our institution has implemented an institu­ tional repository, so one of our primary inter­ ests in conducting the study was to identify the departments and disciplines that are most likely to be early contributors. In this regard, we paid special attention to the copyright is­ sues associated with each type of material and with what we know of the culture of each discipline. We asked, for example, whether a given discipline was known for sharing, per­ haps by putting its results on the Web as soon as possible, or for playing it “close to the chest” until the results can be formally published. Based on these considerations, we iden­ tified the departments to approach fi rst in soliciting material for our institutional reposi­ tory. These departments represent disciplines in which grey literature is not currently easy to locate and retrieve. Our expectation is that this targeted, high­probability­of­success ap­ proach will give our institutional repository a strong start that only gains momentum in the months and years to come. We have gained a better understanding of how our faculty members acquire information on their own and thus a better sense of how to support faculty both in bringing outside literature into the university and in dissemi­ nating the grey literature produced within the university by our own scholars. The interview process provided an op­ portunity to learn more about our colleagues, the departments they support, and the grey literature that is typical in other disciplines. We have a greater appreciation of the huge range of materials and formats covered by grey literature, the overlap of this literature among some disciplines, and the relative importance of grey literature to all our disciplines. Most importantly, we know how we, as librarians, can help our institutional reposi­ tory to become an even better instrument for archiving and disseminating grey literature.4 Notes 1. Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons, “Understanding faculty to improve content recruitment for institutional repositories,” D­Lib Magazine 11, no.1 (2005), www.dlib. org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html (ac­ cessed Jan. 20, 2005). 2. UR Research, https://urresearch.rochester. edu/index.jsp. Accessed May 20, 2005. 3. D. Farace, Third Annual Conference on Grey Literature, Luxembourg, November 1997. 4. We wish to thank our subject librarians, the interlibrary loan staff, Katie Clark, Nancy Foster, and Susan Gibbons for their contribu­ tions to this article. July/August 2005 515 C&RL News https://urresearch.rochester www.dlib