ACADEMIC-LIBRARIES AND COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT IMPLICATIONS FOR GREY LITERATURE

The proliferation of grey literature in all subject areas poses great challenges, concerns and responsibilities for libraries. This article examines the major issues most germane to the acquisition and collecti on development aspects of grey literature and providing access to it i n library collections. With increasing academic and scholarly value pl aced in the grey literature as an original and primary source for info rmation, many collection development policies are beginning to include grey literature as a body of information equally as important as mono graphs, serials, data files, special collections, manuscripts, maps an d other resources in research collections. In the three years since th is article was composed and delivered, there were several major develo pments in scholarly communication and publishing, each benefiting grey Literature greatly. The most paramount was the increase in self-publi shing via the World Wide Web (WWW), which scholarly, professional, and commercial publishing venues adopted as their platform of choice. For grey literature, this has been a most exciting migration, with the mo st enhanced searching capabilities currently available for grey litera ture, plus the ability to integrate formats and various datasets.