Greyguide - guide to good practice in grey literature: A community driven open resource project

The goal of this project is to develop an open source repository of good practices in the field of grey literature. That which originated in monographic form will now open and expand to include content from the global grey literature community. Such practices will range from the production and processing of grey literature through to its distribution, uses, and preservation. The repository will contain guidelines such as those in handling theses and dissertations, how to write research reports, metadata required for working papers as well as good practices in the subject areas of agriculture, health, education, energy, environment, et cetera. The purpose of an online repository of good practice in grey literature will provide the many stakeholders in government, academics, business and industry with the benefits of experience, sustained management, and proven results. The procedure initially applied in this project deals with the design and development of a template that will capture data and information about published as well as proposed good practices within a standard format. While the metadata captured in the template are indeed standardized, their accompanying fulltext documents need not be. Furthermore, the template seeks to identify intended users of a good practice, as well as metadata that will facilitate the search and retrieval of records in the repository. Technical developments related to the design and construction of the repository, its eventual platform as well as its maintenance are other related issues addressed in the project. While there are no direct costs associated with the project, each partner is committed to allocate human and material resources needed to carry out their related tasks. It is expected that the initial phase in acquiring records for the repository will rely on channels available through the Grey Literature Network Service. Populating the repository will be somewhat timeconsuming and the first harvest will not produce an abundance of records. The project is long term; however it is all the more worthwhile. The GreyGuide will provide a unique resource in the field of grey literature that is long awaited and which responds to the information needs of a diverse, international grey literature community. © 2014, GreyNet. All Rights Reserved.