Mapping Italian Grey Communities: What is There Beyond the Academy?

Abstract

The following title was published on an influential Italian newspaper, La Stampa, on November 7, 2013. "Tra i tesori della 'Letteratura Grigia' un'Eneide in napoletano del '600". The article is about the presentation of the "Fondo De Mauro" on the Italian Network of Popular Culture: this fund originates from a private collection built up in several decades and donated to the Network by Tullio De Mauro and his wife Silvana Ferreri in 2011; it is made up of thousands of books, brochures, pamphlets relating to Italian dialects and minority languages. In the field of healthcare, while browsing on the web, we found the title of a PhD thesis of last year: "Letteratura Grigia nelle meta-analisi delle prove ripartite con scelta casuale degli interventi di sanit?". In the legal environment, the title of a Seminar at the University of Siena emerges from the web: "La "centralit?" della legge e la letteratura grigia. Profili di politica del diritto in Italia tra Otto e Novecento" . From these findings, the idea of a survey on the wide variety of grey material available on Italian web portals arises. A first analysis shows that this material is available in different forms and dissemination is carried out through various means such as thematic bibliographies, newspapers articles, various types of documents published in pdf format or simple descriptions on web sites. The following are a few examples excerpted from some home pages belonging to our corpus: ? Collection of grey literature. The Historical Archive of Women candidates for becoming the repository where the memories about these themes will be stored. ? Grey literature . Master copies ? Reprints ? Unreleased copies ? Grey Literature. Archives for the history of Education. ? Grey literature. The high quality brand of parks. ? . International grey literature; national and international legislative data on the topic of drug addiction and related themes; documentary archive . ? Besides literature in German, there is literature in other languages and grey literature as well - in particular catalogues of museums and exhibitions. ? It is about a few thousand of books, brochures and documents of grey literature concerning two topics, Italian dialects and minority languages. Given this scenario, the research aims at verifying whether - and eventually how much - the grey literature available on the web is actually structured, accessible or even managed by systems dealing with its organization and aiming at its retrieval and storing. The utmost goal is to build up a map of non-academic communities and their mechanisms for managing, presenting and disseminating this type of material: a sort of journey among the streams of the web which channel meeting minutes, invites, manifests, fliers, pictures, newspapers articles, journalistic services and audio/video material on various topics. These "grey" products - by conveying basic information about social and popular culture - store, represent and spread knowledge. Significant examples could be identified in the web sites presenting the following matters: history of women's culture and of their movement in some specific Italian regions; projects dealing with the sustainability of urban environment with respect to childhood and adolescence; parks and other natural protected environments; archaeological documentation such as draft reports, diaries from the site, letters and miscellaneous documentation; nursing and health-related disciplines which produce guidelines, diagnostic and therapeutic courses, informative material for patients and their families. Also the theatrical culture is nourished by "grey products" as video archives, collections of music LPs and CDs, brochures, scripts, autograph manuscripts (i.e. letters, correspondences, fliers, musical scores). In substance, a heterogeneous set of material which could reveal especially interesting to both researchers, scientists, professionals and simple fans and lovers of the various subjects if ever made available and usable. Focus Analysis of the documentation and production of taxonomies finalized at the creation of a map of non-academic communities and stakeholders involved in the management of grey material. Material and methods The survey examines the several disciplines, the typology, the institutional nature and the fields to which these grey communities belong, noticing as well the variety of documentation provided, the structure of information and the presentation and access modalities through the following steps: 1) Selection of the web portals as resulted from the query "letteratura grigia" OR "letteratura non convenzionale" OR "documentazione grigia" OR "materiale grigio". 2) Creation of a corpus made up of 28,000 occurrences. 3) Analysis of the various communities and of the grey material retrieved. 4) Statistical elaboration of the data. Conclusions: reflections on the communities and stakeholders involved in the management of grey literature and on the various ways of presenting the documentation provided by the web sites selected for this survey.