Project Greylink
Proposal for a Project within the Greynet Community
by Keith G. Jeffery


Introduction
At the GL8 Conference the idea came up that current metadata standards for
describing, managing, discovering, restricting access to grey literature are
inadequate.

What’s the problem?
Put simply, the current use of DC (Dublin Core) or even MARC means that the
metadata is machine readable but not machine-understandable.  The end-result
is that the input, update and retrieval processes are human-intensive. With
increasing availability of repositories of grey literature this will not
scale.

The proposed Solution
At GL8 (and indeed at previous GL Conferences) the CERIF (Common European
Research Information Format) model was presented.  It can be used both as
data and metadata.  It is a European Union Recommendation to member states
(i.e. an international standard).  It is developed and maintained by
EuroCRIS (www.eurocris.org)

The proposed Project
The purpose of the proposed project is to demonstrate that repositories of
grey (and by analogy other) literature utilising CERIF as their metadata
standard out-perform those using DC in the following ways:

A. For local (institutional repositories):
   (a) quality of input/update
   (b) ease of input/update
   (c) quality of query/retrieval
   (d) ease of query/retrieval

B. For across-repository interoperability
   (e) quality of query/retrieval
   (f) ease of query/retrieval

Requirements of Project Partners:
1. become familiar with CERIF and DC
2. assuming a DC repository exists already, set up a (test) repository
   with CERIF as metadata
3. test the two repositories locally as in (A) above
4. test across both kinds of partner repositories as in (B) above

Administrative Contact:
For the project proposal; formation stage the contact is:
Prof. Keith G. Jeffery, keith.g.jeffery@rl.ac.uk, +44 1235 44 6103



GreyNet
Grey Literature Network Service
Javastraat 194-HS