Good morning. I'm Patty Brennan, Director of the National Library of Medicine. On behalf of the Library of Medicine, I would like to welcome all of you to the 24th International Conference on Gray Literature. And I would also like to extend my congratulations to GrayNet on this 30th anniversary. GrayNet is an international collaboration advancing

access to important text and data resources globally. We're sorry you're not here in Washington, D.C. It's actually quite gray here today, but Washington is a beautiful place and we hope you can join us at some time and perhaps visit the National Library of Medicine here in Bethesda. I do want to compliment GrayNet on its experiences reaching

the world with information from government, academia, and industry. Unpublished yet important information. Recent work done to bring forward information about the war in Ukraine has been particularly important. GrayNet provides an important information service to the world, making sure that gray literature reaches the widest possible audience. Through its

efforts exposing government, academic, and industrial documents, both electronic as well as in print, the GrayNet Dissemination Channel complements and extends what publishers can do in our traditional publication activities. The U.S. government has been a strong supporter

of gray literature dissemination since its gray information functional plan released first in 1995. Recognizing proper stewardship to the American public, the U.S. government has been making concerted efforts to make data, information, and reports created in the conduct of government business available and accessible to the public. Our past president,

Barack Obama, released an executive order in 2013 making open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. This effort has been echoed and endorsed by subsequent administrations. The National Library of Medicine shares with GrayNet commitments to open data and to making data fair that is findable, accessible, interoperable,

and reusable. Many of your partners are our partners, including EBSCO, ORCID, and Figshare. The National Library of Medicine stands ready to assist the gray literature community in ensuring that gray literature is fair and available, useful and accessible.

We are experimenting with making preprints of NIH-funded research discoverable through our PubMed citation database and available through our PubMed Central full text literature database. For the health sciences and biomedical communities, we support the Unified Medical

Language System, or the UMLS, which provides a semantic mapping of over 200 vocabularies in at least 20 languages. This terminology exchange can be useful in making data fair. And finally, the National Library of Medicine works with our sister libraries across the federal

government and our academic medical center and public libraries through the Network of the National Library of Medicine, another way to make access to gray literature and published literature available everywhere. I'm particularly delighted to see the closing panel of this session, in which some of our sister federal libraries will be sharing their experiences with the gray

literature. Esther Lee from the Library Operations at the National Library of Medicine will introduce a panel of three speakers. Each speaker will provide presentations on the challenges and rewards of collecting and processing digital gray literature in the U.S. National Library as an agency. We'll hear from Stacey Lathrop, who is also here at the National

Library of Medicine in our National Center for Biotechnology Information, who will give a presentation, Can Complex Living Content Be Standardized in an Open Science Infrastructure? Tomoko Steen, originally from the Library of Congress and now from Georgetown University,

will give a presentation entitled Gray Literature in the Digital Era, Discussions on the Accessibility of STM that is Science, Technical, and Medical Materials. Finally, Sharad Shah from the Smithsonian Institute will provide a presentation entitled Identification and Access, Working with Gray Literature at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

I wish you a spectacular meeting and hope it's some time to get to see you in the future here in Washington or elsewhere in the world. Thank you for your attention.