Thread by @TobyABGreen

The scholarly record has always comprised *more* than books & journals. Curiously, digital makes it harder for the *more* to join today's record & much is now missing. Librarians and scholars are worried. A long 🧵 (you might want to make ☕️ 🫖 first). #Fiesole2022

1665. The first scholarly journal - a twelve page quarto pamphlet - is published. An industry is born 🍼. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_d…

1665-1996. The publisher-library 'complex' evolves a sophisticated system to publish, curate, collect & disseminate 'human thought'. Serving both readers and authors, it has libraries at its centre.

⏭ to the end of the print era. A lot of scholarly 📖 has been published and carefully archived. (Lest we forget, standing on the shoulders of giants is only possible thanks to the work of librarians. 👏👏👏)

Librarians know that giants need a varied diet - so alongside formally published books and journals librarians also collect #primarysources and #greylit, if they can find it. ("if" doing a lot of work here).

Why "if"?
Lacking a publisher (yes, publishers add value), #greylit and #primarysources are challenging for librarians to find, catalogue and index - but thanks to their efforts, this content took its place in the scholarly record.

So, the scholarly record's in good shape to enter the digital age? Right?

The trouble with digital isn't the much-maligned PDF file . . . it's the digital scaffolding - the metadata - needed to create, manage and find the PDF file. Digital scaffolding is way harder to do than analogue. (I'm a 🇬🇧, so forgive my using unnecessary 'u' & 'e's)

1996-2004. Digital era 1.0. Publishers and librarians move fast to digitise the scholcomm loop, building digital systems (with colourful logos!) at the heart of which is standardised metadata that leads to the PDFs (and other digital stuff too).

But #greylit is left behind. Sure, their producers learn how to produce PDFs, but they don't know how to create metadata (and they don't much care either). So this content becomes harder to find & catalogue. It's excluded from today's scholarly record 😱.

Digital has effectively put a bouncer on the door - No metadata? No entry!

Along comes 2004 . . . and a surprise . . .

No, not THIS surprise (but 👏 Greece, for 🥇🏆 Euro 2004 👏🍾)

. . . no, I was thinking about . . .

. . . Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 unleashed a wave of 'user-generated' content - chaotic, creative, and contumacious (aka stubbornly or wilfully disobedient to authority). But what's that got to do with scholcomm and the scholarly record? Surely academics won't publish on social media?

Allow me to introduce Kamil Galeev @kamilkazani - a Galinova Starovoitova Fellow at the Wilson Center and of St Andrews and Peking Universities. He has over 300k followers. He writes cracking 🧵s about Ukraine-Russia.

Take this one. It's a 103-tweet🧵and takes ~40 minutes to read. It's packed with links, references and citations - just like a working paper or preprint. Except he chose to publish his 'paper' as a tweet thread.

Or how about Professor Chris Grey @chrisgreybrexit who has been writing a weekly blog about #Brexit since 2016. Currently at Royal Holloway, Professor Grey used to be at Warwick and Cambridge Universities and earned his PhD at Manchester.

Chris Grey's Brexit & Beyond blog runs to over 350 weekly posts (some are very long) and they've racked up nearly 7 million views. Prediction: it will be one of the most important primary sources for studying the history of Brexit. And it's currently on the Blogspot platform 😱.

Or, how about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change @IPCC_CH which has been in the news this week because they released the third report in their sixth assessment cycle. Its 207 authors are led by Chairs and teams based at Imperial College and Ahmedabad University.

Until 2014, IPCC published their reports as books, formally, with a publisher. Now they simply release them on their website as #greylit. What was formal is now grey. What was easy to collect is now hard. What should be in the scholarly record, is now missing.

. . . and then there's stuff that doesn't involve the prose (or academics). Guess what? We all help to build this one!
How many libraries have tomtom traffic index catalogued? It's important. Anyone studying #climate, #urbanplanning or post-Covid #socialchange needs it.

And what about this? IPCC's projections for sea-level rise. You might expect to find this interactive dataset and maps on their website. Except it's not there. It's on NASA's website (obviously 🤔🙄).

So,
3️⃣ examples of 👩‍🎓 using Web 2.0 to publish.
5️⃣ examples of scholarly content that ❌➡️ scholarly record.
5️⃣ examples of content that's hard to archive, hard to cite and at risk of link rot.
Thanks to Web 2.0, this is just the tip of a growing iceberg of 'wild content'.

One thing is clear . . .

But how to capture all this 'wild content'?
'Combine' harvesting (ie harvesting, threshing etc in one process) by hand isn't going to work . . . we're going to need machines.
Today, we're at the horse'n'harvest stage of 'combine information harvesting' . . .

. . . but it's going well. @policycommons has already harvested 3.2Mn items from 7,500 organisations (IGOs, NGOs, think tanks & research centres) - metadata'd and ready to get past the bouncer to join the scholarly record . . .

. . . including all 5️⃣ items mentioned in this 🧵. You can check them out here policycommons.net/lists/271/fies…

But we need your help . . . join our network . . .

. . . you will know of organisations with 'wild content' that needs bringing into the scholarly record. We're ready when you are.

Thank you for reaching the end of this 🧵!

Feedback and questions welcome.

👏 to #Fiesole2022 for inviting me to create it.

I hope you've found this thread interesting. Do check out policycommons.net and follow me @TobyABGreen for more stuff about #GreyLit.

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