gl9

While we’re on the subject, go have yourself a whole conference on grey literature in Antwerp, if you want to:

Here’s the program:

DAY ONE

9:00-10:30

OPENING SESSION
Chair, Dr. Geert Van Grootel, Department of Economy, Science and Innovation; Flemish Government, Belgium

• Welcome Address, Representative Flemish Government
• Keynote Address, Prof. Dr. Claudia Lux, President-Elect IFLA and Director General ZLB, Germany
• Opening Paper, Greyscape by Keith G. Jeffery, CCLRC, UK and Anne Asserson, UiB, Norway

11:00-12:30

SESSION ONE - TOOLS FOR PUBLISHING, ARCHIVING, AND ACCESSING GREY LITERATURE
Chair, Julia Gelfand, University of California, Irvine Libraries, United States

• Accessing grey literature in an integrated environment of scientific research information
  Elly Dijk, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, KNAW, Netherlands

• Enhancing Visibility: Integrating Grey Literature in the SOWIPORT Information Cycle
  Maximilian Stempfhuber, Philipp Schaer, and Wei Shen, GESIS / Social Science Information Centre,
  IZ, Germany

• Assessment and improvement of a corporate research information system
  Maria Castriotta, ISPESL – Dept. of Documentation, Information and Training, Daniela Luzi,
  CNR – National Institute of Population Research and Social Policies, and Mariarosaria Manco,
  LINK s.r.l, Rome, Italy

• Open access to full text and ETDs in Europe: improving accessibility through the choice of 
  language? Christiane Stock, INIST-CNRS, France

13:30-15:00

SESSION TWO – USE AND IMPACT OF GREY LITERATURE IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
Chair, Anne Asserson, University of Bergen, Norway

• The impact of Grey Literature in the web environment: A citation analysis using Google
  Scholar Rosa Di Cesare, Daniela Luzi, Roberta Ruggieri, Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le
  Politiche Sociali; CNR, Italy

• Grey literature on bilingualism in Belgium Joachim Schöpfel, INIST-CNRS, France

• The use of GL in historical journals and historical research: A bibliometric and qualitative
  approach Cees de Blaaij, Public and Academic Library of Zealand, Netherlands

• Grey literature for development: Some case studies Bharati Sen, SNDT Women’s University,
  India

15:30-17:00

INFORMATION WALK-THRU – PRODUCT & SERVICE REVIEWS, POSTER PRESENTATIONS

DAY TWO

09:00-10:30

SESSION THREE – GREY LITERATURE IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
Chair, Agnieszka Wenninger, GESIS Service Agency Eastern Europe, Germany

• Opening Paper: Digital Documents in Grey Literature: New Challenges
  Aleksandr V. Starovoitov, Centre of Information Technologies and Systems of
  Executive State Authorities; Lev G. Titarev, International Centre for Informatics
  and Electronics; Yuri M. Bogdanov and Leonid P. Pavlov, VNTIC,The Scientific
  and Technical Information Centre of Russia

• Some types of grey literature – Polish specificity
  Marek Nahotko, Jagiellonian University, Poland

• Grey Literature in Slovenia – Traditional is solved, what’s next?
  Primoz Juznic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

11:00-12:15

SESSION FOUR – NEW FORMS OF GREY LITERATURE IN ELECTRONIC FORMATS
Chair, Dr. Joachim Schöpfel, INIST-CNRS, France

• The Researchers’ Social Network and Grey Literature
  Patricia Erwin, Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection/Dartmouth College,
  United States

• Virtual Reality and Establishing a Presence in Second Life: New Forms of
  Grey Literature? Kristine Ferry, Julia Gelfand, Dana Peterman, and Holly Tomren,
  University of California, Irvine, United States

• Finding the Grey in the Blue: Transparency and Disclosure in Policing
  Paul Sturges and Louise Cooke, Loughborough University, United Kingdom

13:15-14:45

INFORMATION WALK-THRU – PRODUCT & SERVICE REVIEWS, POSTER PRESENTATIONS
(Continued from Day One)

PANEL SESSION – EDUCATION AND GREY LITERATURE
Chair, Prof. Dr. Michael Seadle, Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany (To be confirmed)

• Updating Grey Literature as Distance Education Matures
  Julia Gelfand, University of California, Irvine, United States

• Grey Literature in Library and Information Science Education:
  A survey of faculty, students and courses in North American LIS departments
  Debbie L. Rabina, Pratt Institute, United States

• Grey Literature: A Pilot Course Program via Distance Education
   Dominic J. Farace and Jerry Frantzen; GreyNet, Netherlands; Joachim Schöpfel
   and Christiane Stock; INIST-CNRS, France

15:00-16:00

CONFERENCE RECEPTION
Delegates welcomed by a Representative of the City of Antwerp

gray lit meta

Portal to gray literature search sites.

This is the awesomeness:

GreySource.

Thanks Deb!

texas rain

Weather patterns shifting.

Dead-dry in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida.

Total saturation in Texas.

MSNBC: 

MARBLE FALLS, Texas - Constant downpours that have claimed 11 lives in the past 10 days are giving Texans in the central hill country little chance to recover…“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime,” said Mayor Raymond Whitman, 47, who has lived in Marble Falls his entire life… Whitman Branch Creek in Marble Falls, typically 2-3 feet wide, expanded to at least 100 feet. Several nearby buildings were flooded and several vehicles were swept down the creek. The odor of gas and diesel fuel was heavy in the air… Flooding washed out three bridges and tore off the back wall of the funeral home, Whitman said.

 

ecoresearch media watch

Wow.  Here’s a geographical news viz that represents its news as virtual geography.  Via Infosthetics.  More:

To increase awareness and the availability of environmental information, the IDIOM Media Watch on Climate Change provides a comprehensive and continuously updated account of media coverage on climate change and related issues. The portal aggregates, filters and visualizes environmental Web content from 150 Anglo-American news media sites… The vision of a Geospatial Web promotes the convergence of geographic information, Internet technology and social change. Taking a step towards this vision, the Media Watch on Climate Change uses automated content analysis to extract geospatial context and build a geotagged knowledge base. The interface provides various means to interactively access this knowledge base. It shows that geobrowsers are not only suited to explore geographic features, but can also render other types of imagery such as two-dimensional ‘Semantic Maps’ or three-dimensional Knowledge Planets.

Bruce Sterling proves Michael Gorman right

Recently writing about why Michael Gorman didn’t quite get it right with his Britannica blog post about Web 2.0, I referenced Gorman’s reference of Lanier’s “digital maoism” by pointing toward tightly hyperlinked circle of friends that link in and out of boingboing lots.

So Bruce Sterling Googles himself (er, Technoratis himself), sees his name in the post, and drops a smarmy comment (which I allowed, why the hell not). Makes Gorman’s match point, unfortunately.

It was clear Bruce just swooped in to respond to his name being evoked, and that’s all he was there for. It was, seemed to me, an adolescent & knee-jerk response. Rather cheap, rather uncalculated, and more than a tad disappointing. After all, it’s not like I was being mean to him — I actually gave the lot referenced props for being so damn link worthy and bright.
Gorman was going on (and on) about how Web 2.0 undermines good scholarship, good communication, and authoritative sources. When we slice and dice and parse posts up into the fragments that (happen) to call up our personomies, it reads kinda thirteen-year-old. It reads as context-ignorant. It reads as really rather Gen-MySpace.

I forgive vanity searching. We all do it. But context and due consideration of content is worth about a billion drive-by comments.

A fella needs some close-linking friends, and that’s okay too. The web doesn’t have to be a schoolyard, folks.

patriot act librarian gagging

27bstroke6 / Threat Level has a good one on gagged librarians:

Today, the Connecticut librarians are the only ones who can talk about life with an NSL gag, despite the likelihood that there are hundreds if not thousands of other similar stories out there. “Everyone else who would speak about is subject to a five year prison term,” Chase said. The prison term for violating the gag order was added to the reauthorized Patriot Act.

gray lit gold

You’ll be wanting to search the GrayLIT Network site, a construct of OSTI’s.

I was thinking of “gray” mainly in terms of business / bureau policy, notices, signage even — but there’s a lot more. GrayLIT makes it available for free, often in full text. Government and military conference proceedings… many other goodies.

What is Gray Literature?

The U.S. Interagency Gray Literature Working Group, “Gray Information Functional Plan,” 18 January 1995, defines gray literature as “foreign or domestic open source material that usually is available through specialized channels and may not enter normal channels or systems of publication, distribution, bibliographic control, or acquisition by booksellers or subscription agents.”

Boolean operators work. Truncate with *. ((Can’t seem to sort results by date!)) Aha, here’s the word direct:

While the target Web sites may employ different search options, the following search tips are generally true:

• The search engine is not case sensitive
• Single word or word phrases may be entered in the query box to submit
• If a phrase is entered, the “And” operator is assumed
• The “Or” operator is recognized and will work regardless of “case”
• The wildcard character * (asterisk) may be used to match the word stem.

Search Examples:

photons and colliders

photons or electrons

linear colliders

comput*

And “target websites” refers to one of the 5 databases it searches:

Database Descriptions

Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) Technical Reports Collection This full-text collection provides access to unclassified, unlimited documents. It is a growing subset of over 127,552 reports referenced and available in STINET, which dates back to 1974. Subject areas consist of those associated with defense research and basic sciences including biological and medical sciences; environmental pollution and control; behavioral and social sciences; and patents and patent applications.

DOE Information Bridge Report Collection This site performs full-text searching across over 85,000 reports and over 4.3 million pages. Bibliographic citations are also available. Subject areas include physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and other topics. Full text is available for reports from 1995 forward.

EPA - National Environmental Publications Internet Site (NEPIS) This site offers an increasing number of archival and current EPA documents online. Subject areas include water quality, wastewater, pesticides, ecological issues, wetlands, and many more environmental-related areas. With over 10,000 documents, NEPIS is EPA’s largest electronic documents site.

NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) Technical Reports JPL’s Technical Report Server is a database of searchable citations and abstracts and downloadable full-text technical reports covering propulsion, deep space developments, and robotic missions. Currently, there over 18,172 technical reports online which are available in Portable Document Format (PDF).

NASA Langley Technical Reports This database provides access to publicly available online NASA documents covering aeronautical and space science. Technical reports on this system are in PDF, HTML, or compressed PostScript format. There are over 4,424 full-text reports that are downloadable with searchable citations and abstracts.

bibliometry and transhumanism: new work

Journal of Evolution and Technology’s out with a new volume for Summer. Read my paper there, “Singularity Warfare: A Bibliometric Survey of Militarized Transhumanism.“

Abstract:

This paper examines a number of terms related to transhumanism, and their prevalence in military and government publications. Transhumanism and the technologies attendant to the movement have clear implications for militaries and insurgencies. Although strategists in all camps must begin to plan for the possible impacts of such technologies if they wish to stay relevant and ready on a global scale, the impact of transhuman values is all but nonexistent in the military literature. This paper concludes that the lack of transhuman terms in military journals illustrates an ignorance of transhumanism amongst military thinkers and policy makers.

Shout out to Marcelo, Dr. J, and the reviewers for the constructive criticism!

Good work in this volume. Don’t miss Koepsell’s piece on gene patenting.

coulter and edwards

Quick note — this is lovely.  Elizabeth Edwards politely asks Ann Coulter to be nicer.

citizendium

The citizen’s compendium of everything, if you will… It was “started by a co-founder of Wikipedia… aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names. As of June 19, 2007, we were working on over 2,100 articles.”

They say: “The world needs a better free encyclopedia. Help create it. All unapproved articles are subject to a disclaimer; please read.”

I found via Gorman’s Britannica blog. Ha.