Grey literature and the DEVSIS-Botswana Project: The Case of the national institute of development research and documentation

The NIR Documentation Centre serves the research staff at NIR and other members of the public. It collects, organises and disseminates grey or unpublished literature. In 1984 a project was formulated between the Documentation Centre and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and the Pan African Documentation and Information System (PADIS). The Project sought to assist the NIR to effectively collect and organise its holdings using PADIS methodologies. It would also contribute to the bibliographic database at PADIS and would eventually computerise its own holdings. This was part of a grand scheme to establish a network with PADIS as the hub and with various regional nodes contributing and using the databases at PADIS. Centres like the NIR would be national centres through which other centres in the country would contribute and access the PADIS database. However, NIR itself would gain access to PADIS through the regional mode, to be known as SADIS. This paper will outline the experiences of NIR with such a project and what the results or outcome of this project were. In brief, NIR participated in this project, using PADIS methodologies of processing documents and computerising its holdings. The NIR developed to such an extent that they were ultimately able to develop their own database and to produce DEVINDEX-Botswana without any assistance. The envisaged network however never really took off. The paper will also look at some of the problems that impeded the DEVSIS project and what the project meant for the achievement of effective organisation and dissemination of grey literature.Includes: Conference preprint, Pratt student commentaryXAInternationa