Hello everyone, thank you for having me here today. My name is Sherrod Shaw and I am the Collections Management Librarian with the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, and I was speaking on the topics of identification and access, working with great literature in Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. We're going to be looking at the history and brief of the Smithsonian Libraries

and Archives, some numbers tied to our collections, raising the question, is it gray lit? Exploring how we make it discoverable and also looking at both current and future projects. At first, an introduction in history of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. Established in 1846 along with the Smithsonian, the

foundation of the Smithsonian Libraries is a collection of books and related papers bequeathed to the United States by James Smithson. In 1968, the Smithsonian Libraries were centralized. What does this mean? Well, all the museums had their own libraries and to help reduce duplication of collections and allow

for the communication, collaboration and transfer and check out of materials between branches, they were centralized. It's also a great way of handling interlibrary loan requests. In 2020, the Smithsonian Libraries merged with Smithsonian Institution Archives formed Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, just in time for the pandemic.

Currently, there are 21 branches or library research centers. With the upcoming creation of two new museums, that number should grow to 23 library research centers over the next decade or so. There are also 15 archival resources. Among those is the Smithsonian Institution Archives, which again is now part of the SLA.

Every year, as part of an internal audit of sorts, we collect and enter data on our collections numbers, called the Collections and Digitization Reporting System. It's also called CDRS. The numbers you see here come from the fiscal year 2021 report submitted this past January. As you can see, the Smithsonian Libraries

has just over 2,239,000 volumes. This is monograph, serials, ebooks and other items, which we'll get to in just a second. You'll see that between the libraries and archives, we have about 54,326.9 cubic feet of archives or archival material.

And the libraries has 11,361 cubic feet of archival material. But if it isn't archives, well, what is it? As you can see, we have it classified as art and artist files, vertical files, manuscripts, and ephemera.

We can delve more into that in a minute, but first, let's go back to looking at that 2,239,000 volumes. Trade Lit. Our Trade Lit collection, which is housed in the National Museum of American History, contains approximately 500,000 items.

This is scarce, unique catalogs mostly, which were published between the late 1800s and the first half of the 20th century. Now, what is Trade Lit? This derives from the expression, to the trade, any publication created by a company to promote itself or its products.

And format-wise, it's catalogs, brochures, flyers, ads, price lists, user manuals, company histories, etc. But is it Gray Lit? Well, initially I thought it was, but then I thought it wasn't.

My understanding was that Gray Lit focused on technical reports and research. The Trade Lits are more commercial, again, they're catalogs. However, according to the definition of Gray Lit, as it's laid out by GrayNet, Gray Literature is a field in library and information science that deals with the production, distribution, and access to multiple document types produced on all levels of government, academics,

and as you can see here, business and organization in electronic and print formats, not controlled by commercial publishing, i.e. where the publishing is the primary activity of the producing body. So, is it Gray Lit? Eh, kind of.

The good news is that we have made strides in making it discoverable via the Smithsonian's Collection Search Center. It's a work in progress, but our staff has been working on getting portions of the Trade Lit collection digitized and searchable online.

Now, let's go back to these numbers for a second. Again, that Trade Lit accounts for 500,000 items out of the 2,239,000. So that's a little over one fifth of our volumes, but that doesn't account for the archival material.

And again, what you can see here is the library has 11,361 cubic feet of archival material. And breaking this down, a portion of that is the arts and artists files. The art and artists files clock in at 1,356 cubic feet across 150,000 files, which are housed in seven library research centers.

These files contain ephemera such as exhibition announcements, clippings, press releases, brochures, illustrations, catalogs, reports, etc. Like the Trade Lit collection, this is searchable online via the Smithsonian Collection Search Center.

This is just another example of how the screens look on the page, but I think these screenshots might be too small. Not entirely dissimilar from the art and artists files are our vertical files. The difference is really about topics covered. The arts and artists files focus on,

as you may guess, art and artists, which is a common theme across multiple branches. By comparison, the vertical files may focus on the primary fields of study for a given library or the museum and patron it serves. Case in point, the vertical files for the National Air and Space Museum cover topics like rocketry,

space exploration, and early designs in aeronautics, and lighter than air aircraft like, you know, hot air balloons. Here's an example of our zoological files. There were several files focusing on elephants from different angles,

but I pulled this one to show the range of ephemera you might find in a given folder. So there's greatly there. Now, depending upon the branch, you might have a finding aid or a spreadsheet which breaks down the files and maybe their contents, but that's not always the case.

Regardless, it's not easily searchable online. Going back to the numbers, you'll see 8,988 cubic feet in ephemera. That represents the largest chunk of the library's arc of material and a significant portion of that.

The Aerospace Legacy Materials or ALM collection at 6,560 cubic feet, it makes up over half the arc of material in the Smithsonian Libraries. Largely consisting of technical reports and studies, it is definitely gray lit.

This collection is growing, but it's been coming to us in large chunks, starting back in 1972 when the National Air and Space Museum and its library were founded. The initial chunk came to us from Belcom because the Air and Space Museum's librarian worked at Belcom before coming to the Smithsonian.

And she had these reports and they were about to be junked or trashed, and she realized that they had some enduring research value, so she brought them along with them. We've since received transfers from other agencies like the FAA and corporations and private donors. Now, enhanced discoverability thanks to Internet and new search tools like WorldCat, Google, et

cetera, have provided insight as to who else might own some of this gray lit. So far we're in fourth place with about 400,000 items. NASA is in third place with 500,000 plus. Second place is the National Technical Report Library with 800,000.

In first place goes to the Defense Technical Information Center with 4.7 million. In the coming years, this collection is going to be moved out from its current location in the Smithsonian Library's research annex in Landover, Maryland, to the Stephen F. Udvar Haas Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

And these are just some more images of the collection and an idea of what the reports might look like. Now, unlike the trade lit collection artist files, the ALM collection is currently not searchable online. The only way we can really navigate it or have an idea of what's in the holdings is by the use of the card catalog.

Looking to the future, if you want to get the collection order out in Chantilly, here's our plan, which right now we're weeding it for duplicates. And in about a month, we're going to have a consultant come out and conduct a preservation assessment and determine what treatment and supplies collection may need before the move. After that, we're going to order the treatment supplies, begin rehousing material as has been recommended.

Then we pack, then we move, then we unpack, and we place collection back in order out in Chantilly. After that, the last step is to make it discoverable using Wiki tools, in this case, the Smithsonian's Wiki base.

This is a bit tricky because we've been working with limited resources in terms of onsite people who have physical access to the collections and our cataloging unit. So flexibility and something that isn't particularly labor intense or acquiring a high level of technical expertise is needed. Tied to that, we'll be exploring the possibility of digitizing portions of the collection.

I think that largely depends upon what isn't already available online from the other repositories I previously mentioned. I guess the key here is to help and contribute to making the research discoverable and accessible to researchers without necessarily duplicating the work of others or creating unnecessary redundancies.

Right here, you can see an image of what our Wiki base looks like. This is just a pilot example from the NASA archives. And that is all I have to say about that. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you very much.