Making things besides journal articles available | Christina's LIS Rant

"Libraries have always had a problem with gray literature. Unpublished dissertations, technical reports, conference papers, government documents, maps, working documents... they are one level of difficult to find. Some say, 'well, if it's good information it will be in the journal literature' or 'if it's worth saving, it will be in the journal literature.' But we know that: details are left out of the methods sections, data are not included, negative results are under reported, etc. In some fields conferences are as easy to find as journal articles whereas in other fields they're impossible (and some of that is due to the level of review and importance of the communication to that field). Practically, if you get the idea for something from a blog post, then you need to attribute the blog post. If the blog post goes missing, then your readers are out of luck ..."