Global Grey Literature in Health: Identification, Preservation, and Sustainability

Abstract

The New York Academy of Medicine Library has been aggregating grey literature in public and global health since 1999. The Grey Literature Report's primary focus has been on the United States with a rapidly growing interest in the more global environment. NYAM has a growing interest in expanding the global perspective of the report which is motivated by: *) An increased capacity to identify information produced in the global world by NGOs and international agencies as a result of the engagement of the world in technology. *) A common concern in sharing best practices and lessons learned via the dissemination of information that is often hard to find. *) A recognition that the capture of this information and the preservation of it, whether print or digital, may, in many cases, be the only record of documents in the future. *) A benefit to developing transparency of grey literature as an "added value" to research in health, and particularly global urban, public, environmental, and social health. *) An alignment with the mission and interests of NYAM. This paper will outline the specific steps NYAM is taking to broaden the coverage of the Grey Literature Report to represent undeveloped countries. We will begin with a focus on the countries of the southern hemisphere. It is in these countries where health issues are critical to future development. Since many of these countries do not have stable municipal infrastructures that allow for traditional approaches to literature identification, aggregation, and dissemination, NYAM will be developing strategies to identify grey literature in many different ways. We will document our approaches to these new geographic areas; how we identified where to begin; the analysis of what we needed to do; and the steps we took to implement our plan of work. We will share the workflow that we create from these strategies and the results- both successes and disappointments, which may develop from these approaches into our newly expanded geographic focus.Includes: Conference preprint, Powerpoint presentation, Abstract and Biographical notes, Pratt student commentaryXAInternationa