The problems of organising and disseminating grey literature in Africa

Grey literature constitutes a substantial proportion of literature produced in Africa. The major producers are government agencies, universities, research organisations and the private sector. Most of the developmental literature produced in Africa usually appears in the form of grey literature. Unfortunately grey literature is hardly organised or disseminated in Africa.The difficulty in organising and disseminating grey literature stems from the fact that producers, for one reason or the other tend to neglect them once they have satisfied the purposes for which they were created. Also most countries do not have well-developed infrastructures for organising and controlling grey literature. In addition to these problems, the potential users of grey literature such as researchers, students and other professionals do not know that a lot of information they may never have found in conventional literature abounds in grey literature, hence they hardly exploit the contents of grey literature. In order to ameliorate these problems, it is recommended that every country should establish a national documentation centre for grey literature with the main objective of collecting, organising and disseminating grey literature emanating from the country. This is without prejudice to national libraries, which are empowered by law to collect and provide bibliographic access to all publications emanating from a country. The national libraries can concentrate mainly on conventional literature. Progressive information professionals should become private entepreneurs and get involved in information broking. Thus they can provide bibliographic access to some kind of grey literature such as conferences, theses and dissertations, technical reports, feasiblility reports, technical papers, etc. Such information products, which could be produced periodically can be sold to interested buyers all over the world. Learned societies and associations must provide for the collection of grey literature produced within their disciplines and ensure that there is a bibliographic access to them by co-operating with the information brokers in their subject fields.Includes: Conference preprint, Pratt student commentaryXAInternationa