Thank you so much for the invitation. Today, I am going to talk about gray literature in the digital era, discussions on the accessibilities and the digitization of STEM materials. I'm Tomoko Steen.

I'm a professor of the microbiology and the director of the graduate program in biomedical science policy and advocacy at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. Today's presentation is based on my personal observations. I have worked as a university professor

and as a senior research specialist at the Library of Congress. I retired from the Library of Congress on June 30, 2022. Thus, my presentation does not represent the views of the Library of Congress,

nor Georgetown University. What is gray literature? Gray literature is information produced by government agencies, academic institutions, and also the for-profit sector. That is not typically made available

by commercial publishers. This is a definition presented by Johns Hopkins University's Welch Medical Library. And I often follow this definition. There are several other definitions for gray literature, but this is one

of my simple favorite ones. Types of gray literature include reports, proceedings, dissertations and the theses, white papers, newsletters, patents, and registered trials.

Today, I will only discuss STEM-focused gray literature here. And most of my experience is STEM topics.

Digital archives made valuable materials accessible to the world. I hope everyone agree that. I'd like to share with you my unique experience. I worked at both sides of the library counter.

Researcher and professor, I have been a professor and a historian of science and science policy educator, but 21 years I spent at the Library of Congress

as a librarian and worked also on archival materials. When the gray literature was not digitized, the difficulties I faced as a scientist was

I could not access to proceedings, technical reports and dissertations. I needed when I was writing scientific papers. The difficulties I faced as a historian of science was archival materials were not digitized

or had limited access. And I have to travel really long way to see materials and or even the, I get there, some of the materials are not accessible

for several different reasons. The difficulties I faced as a educator was materials I wanted to assign my students were not accessible or expensive to copy and hard to distribute. On the other hand, digitizing gray literature

was a challenge. Challenges I faced processing digital gray literature as an archivist was a long list of digitization requests in a institution like Library of Congress.

The list is really, really long. And I was not sure even that materials I got passed to allow to digitize are going to be digitized before I die.

And some of the materials are very expensive of course to digitize and even federal agency like the Library of Congress, I knew that funding is an issue. Also, some of the materials are very, very fragile,

so too fragile to process digitization. Also, personally identifiable information or in the gray literature and PII is really a concern. And approval, getting approval most of all

from a supervisor and hire administrator was very, very difficult. I involved in two different digitization project.

One was called War and Peace Project. And basically it was history of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So the Japanese archivist were to find archival materials

both in Japan and the U.S. and digitize all of them and put in one archive. How to copy become really accessible to more broader audience.

And that was a purpose and funded by Japan Society for Promotional Science, JSPS. And it was archived at McGovern Historical Center under University of Texas Medical School, Houston campus.

And also another one I worked on and that was the main reason I took a job at the Library of Congress is World War II Japanese and Nazi German STEM collections. At the Library of Congress. And the collections were scattered throughout the library

but quite many science materials, technical reports and standards section. Also at the Japanese section under Asian division and also rare book division as well as motion picture division has some of the collections.

They are amazing collections on that topic. And we Americans knew what type of scientific and technical research, medical research also were done in Germany and Japan.

And as soon as war ended, we sent experts to those countries and brought back these valuable materials. However, at the Library of Congress while have a many language experts happen to be,

there was nobody actually had the science and technology and medicine background with Japanese and German language standards. So I was called in to review these collections.

These are the reasons I stayed at the Library of Congress 21 years. There was these collections, just a wonderful project both of the projects, but there was a problem.

War and Peace Project when the government historical center archived and put on a web, there was a huge number of the complain came from a veterans group and also the survivor of atomic bomb,

survivors of atomic bomb because issues were very much as PII and also ethical issues.

So they had to bring down from the web and they do still have a collection on a standard computer. And also same reason, one or two Japanese and Nazi German STEM collections.

There are a lot of issues of the PII and the ethical issues as well. And these are one of the main issue we need to discuss further, especially for great literature meetings.

I think it's a really central question. Are there any questions? I'm happy to take questions. Please send me email at TYS8 at the Georgetown.

Thank you so much for your attention.