[LINK] Grey literature conference at NLA in October

[tomk]

On 22/09/2012 10:02 a.m., Tom Worthington wrote:
> I suggest that librarians should free themselves from being unpaid 
> agents of commercial publishers. Librarians could help authors publish 
> directly, in the public interest. 

Not-withstanding that I agree with the idea of divorcing humanity's 
consumption of literature from JStor and other middlemen, is it not a 
truism that the profession of archivist/archivism originated with the 
scrolls in Alexandria that were written by scholars whom were invariably 
funded by well to do members of the merchant community ?

Ergo, if we remove the funding mechanism (the publishers) what role 
remains for the Librarian ? (That isn't fulfilled by Google ?) - Ahh, 
the Grey Publishing.  As that group nominally contains those works that 
the state considers irrelevant, this seems to present us with a 
counter-intuitive, contrary conundrum to all Government employed Archivists.

It would seem to me that to ensure tenure survival, archivists need to 
make themselves more relevant to the state by becoming peer reviewers of 
Grey materials and cross referencing the apparent irrelevant material 
with some form of hypertextual referencing "relevating" system and 
associate same to our community id.

Whilst this role is traditionally the role of researchers, potentially I 
think TomW is saying that this material isnt referenced because no-one 
knows it exists. (Therefore somewhere in there could be the answer to 
over unity energy generation, an antithesis to E=MC2 and all sorts of 
goodies....)

Could I suggest that disaffected archivists get together with 
disaffected systems admins and utilise "grep" along with a few if 
string="buzzwordoftheday"'s to regain ground stolen by Google and 
forward copies of Archivists written abstracts to a non-affiliated Grey 
think tank so the goodies can become accepted science.

TomK