Roadmap of grey literature systems and services in Italy. Spotlight on Italian GL producers and production moving between e-resources and paper currency

Since 1985, the CNR Central Library "G. Marconi" as a member of EAGLE-SIGLE association is collecting all grey literature documents produced by the European Union countries. As National Reference Centre of Italy it accomplishes the institutional tasks with particular regard to the selection, collection, elaboration and management of grey literature data produced in the country; moreover, in the last two years, it is promoting a national bibliographic control by encouraging presentation, knowledge and diffusion of the "grey material" with the involvement of the concerned producers. In fact many unpublished documents, because not available or circulating in a limited number of copies and not indexed in the public bibliographic databases, turned out to be so rilevant for the advancement of a research project or for an experimentation, that the a researcher is involved in several bibliographic computer-assisted retrievals. This causes waste of time for studies produced by academic institution, scientific societies, foundations and cultural associations. In order to fulfill such emerging requirements, the working group of the C.N.R. Central Library which operates in the grey bibliographic publications, is trying to draw attention to the problems concerning avaibility and diffusion of these publications. Therefore, for the pursuit of the goal proposed and in the benefit of the user demands, a feasible study finalized to the survey of grey literature was planned, paying a special attention to producers and to users. This study, although complex and difficult to carry out, resulted to be useful for its basic qualities for the location of the so-called "grey products" which are now innumerable and characterized by a great scientific and economic interest. Furthermore, the creation of a "grey biblio-geographic map" highlighted many institutions, agencies, pharmaceutical societies and hospitals which costantly rely on the grey literature for their activity. This phenomenon, mainly observed in the scientific-medical area, had a strong increase in the private industrial field as well as in the public, with interesting feedback on the users. We have identified clinical trials which make use of particular pharmaceutical products, administrative documents that assumed a real juridical form, labour proposals then become, in the course of the works, regulations for collective agreement, pre-prints used for research results communication in a very short time. All these documents gave a contribution to design a new publication model, the paper and on-line grey publication) whose characteristics are verifiable in the instantaneous diffusion , in the acknowledgment of the work responsibility, so personal as communitary, in the economic realization of the product, in contrast to the traditional prefixed periodicity patterns, comparable in its publishing typographic cover. Particularly through the investigation carried out, the "grey scenario" revealed the presence of an actual and solid bibliographic issues that, althought distinct and diversified with different topics, presents a common base of knowledge, separated but united by the collections branches of the thesaurus connections (scope notes) offering a vital and interesting outline of the italian grey literature publications.