Welcome to the Grey Lit Café

We kick off our podcast by asking; what is grey literature? why does it matter? and why Grey Lit Café?

This episode features co-hosts, Engy Moussa and Anthony Haynes.


References

[Mentioned at about 04:30]  Research communication and grey literature: a rising tide: https://writeyourresearch.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/03-nov-20-white-on-grey.pdf

[Mentioned at about 11:03] The website of GreyNet: http://www.greynet.org/ 

Further readings on grey literature:

• [Book] Sarah Bonato, Searching the grey literature: a handbook for searching reports, working papers, and other unpublished research, London: Rowman & Littlefield (2018)
• {Book] Dominic J. Farace and Joachim Schöpfel (ed), Grey literature in library and information studies,  Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG (2010).  
• [Journal paper] Amanda Lawrence, 'Influence seekers: the production of grey literature for policy and practice' Information services & use, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 389-403, 201 (2017). DOI: 10.3233/ISU-170857.
• [Discussion paper] Amanda Lawrence et al., 'Where is the evidence? Realising the value of grey literature for public policy and practice', Swinburne Institute for Social Research (2014). DOI: 10.4225/50/5580B1E02DAF9.

 
Credits

• Sound production: Bart Hallmark
• Music: from Handel's Water Music, courtesy of the United States Marine Band and Marine Chamber Orchestra

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Greetings and a very warm welcome to the Gray Lit Cafe Podcast. Brought to you by Front Limited Front is a communications consultancy focused on engineering infrastructure and sustainability. With you today is MUA scientist and teaching associate at Cambridge University, and I'm very honored to be accompanied by Mr. Anthony Hays, creative director of front in this edition where we discussed the launch of the Gray Lit Cafe. In essence, what is it about, what is it for, and even why this particular name? So without further review, let me welcome Mr. Hins Greeting

Speaker 2: 0:45

Cji.

Speaker 1: 0:45

Thank you so much for joining us today, Mr. Hins. And let me ask you directly, what is the gray literature? Well,

Speaker 2: 0:51

That's<laugh>, that's not an easy question. Um, over time there is, um, people have tried to propose sort of general or purpose definitions, uh, and they've tried to define gray literature for, for example, by the, the genre, the kind, the kinds of communications of gray literature include. And they've tried to define it by, uh, its distribution, the fact that gray literature's traditionally been distributed, not, not through the book trade and the usual library suppliers and so on. Um, and they tried to define it by the publishers, the organizations that publish literature. And actually, I think none of these approaches have really very satisfactory in terms of a general definition.

Speaker 1: 1:37

So what is your approach to the literature then?

Speaker 2: 1:41

Okay, so my approach is rather than try and propose a general definition that's going to suit all people for all purposes, what we do at front time is simply try and clarify what we mean when we use a term and in particular for this podcast, what do we mean for that purpose by gray literature? And I characterize it in two ways really. One, one is I would say what I would call negative and the other is positive. So the negative characterization is to say, what I don't mean by gray literature. And the best way I can explain that is if you think of a spectrum and that the one end of the spectrum, uh, comes ephemera, you know, very small, occasional, it's a communication like, um, you know, uh, getting a receipt when you buy something or a getting a, a mission ticket for an event or something like that. But I would call that ephemera. Now, some people include ephemera in when they're talking about gray literature, and I, I don't, so when I'm talking about gray literature, I'm not talking about eem. And then at the other end, uh, what gets called sort of proper publishing, you know, things like, um, journal papers in scholarly journals and professionally published books published by Oxford University Press, uh, or whatever with ISBs. And generally speaking, I don't include those in my definition of gray literature either. So when I'm talking about gray literature, I, I would define it negatively as not eph and not proper publishing, but something that fill gap in the in between.

Speaker 1: 3:18

Okay, that's very interesting. But then how do you characterize grade teacher positively then?

Speaker 2: 3:23

The way I try to do that is simply to indicate the kind of thing we mean by, um, identifying the typical examples. And for me, the most typical examples in terms of the forms are things like reports, white papers, booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, dissertations, teaching materials, and then with tho those are the traditional forms of gray literature. And in addition, we have more recently developed forms such as blogs, podcasts, slide decks.

Speaker 1: 4:04

Wow, this, this is very rich topic and field, to be honest, and it seems to be steadily growing from the examples that you mentioned. Yes. And it leads me to, to ask why, um, Fontine has decided to launch a podcast on great editor now?

Speaker 2: 4:18

Well, gray Lit has been important for a very long time, but there are certain trends that are making it even more important today. Um, some of these trends are quite technical ones, and we, we've published a, a white paper on them, but I think they're really of rather specialist interest. So I won't go into'em in detail here. I will put a link to the white paper in the show notes instead. But there are two general trends that I think are raising the tide for gray. The first is digitalization. And that's had a massive effect on gray literature. The first thing it does is it makes it much easier to archive gray lit and therefore it's easier for people to retrieve it in the future. If you think of things I mentioned, things like booklets and leaflets and pamphlets, they're a bit of a nightmare in print form. They're a bit of a nightmare for librarians. They're all different shapes and sizes and they don't stand up on the shelf properly and so on. Um, they're much easier to collate digitally. And what that means is the shelf life of gray literature expands. Um, I remember, I'll give you an example. I was writing a book about writing and I wanted to refer to some research done at the University of York in the 1980s. Uh, and the university published some small format research reports, and I just couldn't find them. I just couldn't locate them anywhere. They disappeared from view by the time I wanted to write my book. Whereas these days when people produce gray literature, um, at the very least you'll find a reference to, um, a reference to the publication hang around. But actually increasingly what happens is the actual text in PDF or whatever also remains available on the internet. So gray literature doesn't disappear as quickly as it used to. I think also in terms of digitalization. So I, I'm aware this is a rather longer answer than you might feel hoping for, but No,

Speaker 1: 6:16

No, it's very, very insightful, to be honest. So please, the floors, yours.

Speaker 2: 6:19

Well, it also makes gray literature, the distribution more difficult, obviously. Um, you know, in the old days getting a piece of literature from let's say Oxford to Sydney and let alone Beijing might have been quite a difficult thing to do. And now of course that's very easy to do online. I think also digitalization has, uh, actually produced a good deal of creativity because it's enabled the development of new forms. So if you think of blog posts, which I suppose in some way is a sort of equivalent of essays, the traditional form of essays, but also has its own character and the same with the relationship between podcasts and lectures. So I think Digitalizations created new forms and in addition, it's created a really exciting area, which is interactive resources. So with digitalization, you can not only publish a data set, but you can publish it in manipulable form so people can play around with it.

Speaker 1: 7:23

Wow, excellent. I never thought of digitalization as like that much diverse. Um, but what about the second general trend then of, um, that we can discuss today?

Speaker 2: 7:34

Well, the other trend is government policy. And this obviously varies a bit between territories, but actually there's some, um, quite common themes. I think, um, there's, generally speaking, there's been an increased emphasis in recent years on the notion of making research produce an impact on what we call the real world. Um, in other words, there's an interesting enabling research to impact on businesses and the public and government departments and so on, rather than just be of interest to people in the communities that actually produce a research. So increasingly, researchers have been evaluated and their funding is becoming dependent on their ability to make an impact beyond the campus. And what that means is, of course, you have to learn to communicate to new audiences. You know, you have to learn to communicate to policy makers, for example, or to, uh, school teachers or clinicians or whoever it might be. And the problem with that is just producing endless stream of peer reviewed journal papers in journals that aren't read by these audiences. That's not gonna work. Uh, you're gonna have to do something that takes you outta that and you're gonna have to start communicating in forms that people in business and government and social life and so on actually can see an ac accessing can see.

Speaker 1: 9:04

Excellent. Actually that echo I to echo that we have, like in academia in particular, a move that have been for few years now regarding like bridging the gap between academia and policy making and new forms have indeed came about, um, writing policy papers, uh, short reports, all these. So yeah, I definitely see that, although we don't use that great literature term, but I think it, it fits what we are doing. And with through such a podcast, people getting to know more about what it means to you, the gray literature term, I think it just fits perfectly and people should, should go with it. And that takes me to the most interesting part, the name<laugh>. So at front you have decided to call this podcast Cast Gray Lit Cafe. So what does that cafe bit indicate?

Speaker 2: 9:50

Well,<laugh>, our intention is simply to convey, um, a, a a feeling that the podcast, um, is, is a, a relaxed thing, a a and an informal thing. And we also want to capture the idea of, uh, having a short break. Um, you know, you take a break in in your day to have a quick cup of coffee. It's that idea,

Speaker 1: 10:12

Highly needed

Speaker 2: 10:13

<laugh>, indeed, I'm a great fan of good coffee. And, um, and so, um, our intention is to make our episodes pretty short, like a coffee break. So, um, our typical length will be 10 to 15 minutes, which is rather shorter than most podcasts, but we, we, we think, um, we think there's definitely a, a demand for people who seeming content in, in quite shorter time spans.

Speaker 1: 10:42

Oh, that sounds really fun,<laugh>, but also a challenge to be honest, su tackle such interesting themes in such a concise format. Um, yes, yes. I know you will provide our audience with various resources to further enrich their knowledge on the topics, like with the course. Uh, but maybe just to launch this habit today, uh, what would be your top recommendation on the theme of grade literature? Okay,

Speaker 2: 11:03

Well, I, what I will do is in the show notes, I'll actually put references to a number of resources on specific aspects of gray literature. But I think in terms of a general resource, the one I would recommend is the website of an organization called Gray Net International. And I'll put the link in the show notes, but the URL is very simple one, it's simply grain net.org. It's not visually the most stimulating website. It's not a beautiful design, but it's very, very rich in content.

Speaker 1: 11:34

Excellent. I can't wait to check that out. Thank you very much Mr. Anthony for this insightful edition and thank you. Oh,

Speaker 2: 11:41

Thank you. It's been a real pleasure.

Speaker 1: 11:43

Thank you, professor. And thank you all for listening. This was Ji Musa with Anthony Haines. Gralet Cafe is edited by Dr. Bart Hallmark and produced by front limited front specializes in gray literature forms such as proposals, publications, papers, and reports. The music is from handles water music, courtesy of the United States Marine Band and Marine Chamber Orchestra. Goodbye.