489 Shades of Grey Literature

David Edelmann, an intern for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) Library was tasked with tackling a review of the Library’s Chesapeakiana Collection. The SERC Library has a collection of approximately 12,600 books, monographs, and academic journals and within this collection there is a substantial number of grey literature, 489 to be exact. Edelmann’s job was to first catalog and organize these titles on a spreadsheet and then research and find any information she can on them and of course catalog and save that information.

Edelmann used resources such as the SERC Library, the National Museum of Natural History, Google, University and other academic networks, subscriptions, and governmental databases in order to find any digital copies of these 489 titles. Once the research was done, Edelmann saved all the data on multiple systems and drives.

Digital Projects Librarian, Keri Thompson, and Edelmann discussed possibly making these findings accessible to the public via the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) and possibly even Zotero, another publicly accessible website. For now, the information is only accessible on the Google Drive Edelmann used an the Smithsonian Intranet.

Read more on this project here.