Making Grey Literature Available through Institutional Repositories.

One of the major components of grey literature is conference proceedings. A major purpose of conferences is to disseminate research in a particular area, and this is often done through conference proceedings. However, although many libraries collect conference proceedings, they collect them mostly in print. With the advent of digital library collections—electronic journals, digital library projects, etc.—conference proceedings have been neglected. Even though the research in conference proceedings can be as vital as that in any journal article, the access to conference proceedings has not kept pace with access to other types of library resources. In its support of the Life Sciences Group at Cornell, Mann Library identified this lack of online access to conference proceedings as a problem whose exploration and resolution might benefit faculty and researchers supported by the library. Librarians at Mann embarked on a pilot project to identify a set of Cornell conference proceedings as a candidate which should be made available online to researchers. In addition, they took advantage of Cornell's membership in the nascent D-Space Federation and used the D-Space Institutional Repository system to make the proceedings available online. They loaded the set of proceedings they had identified into D-Space and created metadata to facilitate searching for the proceedings within the system. They then demonstrated this system at the annual meeting of the conference. The positive reception to the conference demonstration convinced the librarians involved with the project that making conference proceedings available online to researchers was a worth while service that should be further explored. In the process of identifying the proceedings, collecting them, and making them available online, the librarians encountered a number of issues that they would need to address as they further explored the service and determined whether or not it should be implemented as a full program. Despite these issues in planning for a sustainable institutional repository for conference proceedings, the librarians involved felt that the feedback they had received from the researchers at the conference supported the notion of expanding the project. If the expansion of the project succeeds, it will be another means of providing access to grey literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]