1. Office of Scientific and Technical Information
Brian Hitson
Associate Director
Office of Scientific and Technical Information
U.S. Department of Energy
Introduction
Opening Remarks

2. What is “Grey”
Wikipedia: “…a body of materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels such as publishers…”
“ information that is not searchable or accessible through conventional search engines or subject directories and is not generally produced by commercial publishing organisations.” (National Library of Australia)
Webster’s Dictionary: “An achromatic colour between the extremes of black and white.”
Defining grey literature - examples

3. “Between the extremes of black and white”
published journals
books
professional society conference proceedings
preprints
e-prints
technical reports
lectures
numeric data sets
audio/visual media
blogs
fora, etc.
ideas
concepts
thought
Grey literature also used to describe “deep web”.
Grey = Deep

4. Two Key Challenges of the “Deep”
1. What you don’t know can hurt you (or, at least, it could help you).
Challenges of grey literature.
Expand on: storage/preservation issues, accessibility, and exponential growth

5. Two Key Challenges of the “Deep”
2. Time = money and delayed progress.
Challenges of grey literature.
Expand on: storage/preservation issues, accessibility, and exponential growth

6. Overcoming Challenges of the “Deep” First Deep Web Search Engine:
Deep Web Databases
Surface Web
Federated search drills down to the deep web where scientific databases reside
How federated searching enables better access to grey literature
First Deep Web Search Engine:
Science.gov

7. Prominent Deep Web Search Engines
Science.gov
ScienceAccelerator.gov
E-print Network
Science Conference Proceedings
Federal R&D Project Summaries

8. WorldWideScience.org – makes grey literature from around the world available
Background/history of WWS.

9. WorldWideScience.org Databases/Portals

10. WorldWideScience.org History
Concept introduced by OSTI Director, Walt Warnick, June 2006, Bethesda, Maryland
Bilateral U.S.(DOE)/ U.K. (British Library) partnership, January 2007, London  
More background/history, and current status

11. WorldWideScience.org History Continued
Demonstration of first prototype, June 2007, Nancy, France
Multilateral governance structure, WorldWideScience Alliance, established June 2008, Seoul
Common ingredient: International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI)
More background/history, and current status

12. WorldWideScience.org Facts and Figures
Searches 49 science databases and portals sponsored by governments and national institutions in 54 countries
Covers scientific literature from over three-fourths of the world’s population
Includes a vast quantity of science (over 375 million pages), much of which is grey literature

13. Describe WWS searching and variety of databases and portals being searched

14. Highlight ETDEWEB record (technical report from Denmark) as an example of grey literature being searched via WWS

15. Highlight another record showing grey literature, in this case, a brochure published in the U.K.

16. Screen capture from NORA, which in turn has pulled a record from the University of Bergen

17. Record from CSIR

18. Record from Nepal Journals Online

19. Record from ARROW, in this case, an Australian thesis with full text available.

20. What’s Next for WWS.org? Overcoming scalability issues
Offering alerts service
Searching multilingual sources
Discuss preservation issues and emergence of new formats as future challenges

21. Broader Challenges in “Grey”
Improving access to and search of emerging grey literature:
Multimedia sources
Images
Data sets

22. ICSTI Technical Projects
Numeric Data
Multimedia
Web 2.0
Describe each TACC project – goals and status

23. Conclusions Grey is… Global Growing
Good…for science medicine technology
Concluding remarks