This paper argues that the distinction between grey and non-grey (or white) literature will become less relevant over time, as online discovery options proliferate. In the meantime, the political success of the open access publishing movement has valuable lessons for proponents of increasing access to grey literature.

The interactive society is characterized by a desire for participation that involves, on the one hand, citizens, workers and customers and on the other, politicians, decision makers and entrepreneurs â irrespective of whether this occurs in the public or the private sectors. Another way of explaining the interactive society can be found in the concept of 2.0. Libraries must relate to web 2.0 in the same way they related to web 1.0. The key is to identify the possibilities that the new techniques offer.

This position paper argues that the Web 2.0 phenomenon is an important object of study for information systems research, and that a social informatics approach to understanding Web 2.0 is particularly relevant and useful. We discuss Wikipedia as an example of empirical research on Web 2.0 that can help bridge the divide between academic and popular discourse on new technology movements.

This preprint has been published in Human Dimensions of Wildlife 11(3). State wildlife agencies have little guidance about what Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) information to present on their Websites. This article describes four approaches to public information publication (private citizen view, attentive citizen view, deliberative citizen view, stakeholder publisher) that agency staff can employ to consider what CWD information to offer to the public.

This position paper argues that the Web 2.0 phenomenon is an important object of study for information systems research, and that a social informatics approach to understanding Web 2.0 is particularly relevant and useful. We discuss Wikipedia as an example of empirical research on Web 2.0 that can help bridge the divide between academic and popular discourse on new technology movements.

This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing " Peer-to-peer systems allow the seamless sharing of digital materials between strangers who may live in different countries or different continents. As networks such as Kazaa and Gnutella shuffle files effortlessly over the Internet, national boundaries are visible only to those who bother to look up the IP addresses of the machines involved. In the eight years since the debut of Napster, a huge volume of legal, popular and scholarly attention has been paid to peer-to-peer file sharing. But despite the inherently global nature of these networks, very little of this attention has been devoted to use of these networks outside North America and Western Europe. I explore the cultural meanings of file sharing in Ukraine. Ukraine, the second most populous of the former Soviet republics, had been named as one of the ten â priority countriesâ with â unacceptable piracy rates.â IFPI and other industry and governmental bodies present piracy in straightforward terms as a crime, and emphasize links between music piracy and violent organized crime. The international struggle against piracy is seen as a matter of building a strong legal framework in developing countries and then making sure that local authorities enforce these laws. They assume that national development follows a linear path from the lawless frontier of unchecked piracy to the well policed copyright regime evidenced in the United States. In contrast, I argue that file-sharing practices in Ukraine reflect distinctive features of its cultural heritage. They are not simply the result of a primitive stage of legal development. Until 1991, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. The USSR did not recognize the concept of intellectual property, particularly as it related to foreign and scientific works. For example, generations of Soviet children grew up reading a popular story by Russian writer Aleksander Volkov. It told of a little girl from Kansas who was transported by a tornado with her dog Totoshka on a trip to visit a wizard. Even today, few realize that the work is a translation. Internally, however, Xerox machines were banned, and as dissident culture developed from the 1960s onward the illicit reproduction of unsanctioned material was seen as an heroic act of resistance. Manuscripts were photographed, retyped or copied long hand and passed from person to person in a practice known as samizdat. This was punishable by long terms in prison labor camps. As I pursued my own research on the use of file sharing technology in Ukraine, I started to wonder what the experience of seventy years of Soviet rule done to shape Ukrainian thinking on the issue of file sharing and music downloading. I began to realize that Ukrainian users had a quite different sense than their American comrades of the copyright issues involved, the relevance of communism to file sharing, and indeed the cultural meaning of file sharing technology within Ukrainian society. These, I argue, can only be understood through reference to their diverging historical experiences. Analysis of the discussion of copyright, piracy and Internet file sharing in the Ukrainian press and within the Ukrainian community website Muzon.com demonstrates that local attitudes and practices have been profoundly shaped by the Soviet experience. Todayâ s intellectual property environment reflects both Soviet cultureâ s lack of concern for the rights of individuals, businesses, and foreign government and the struggle of opposition and nationalist groups to freely distribute material outside the control of Soviet authorities. These two factors, while in many ways opposed, both influence Ukrainians to reject constraints on the free distribution of copyrighted materials. In addition, the efforts of Western businesses and governments to enforce their own copyright regimes on Ukraine trigger resentment in a nation that long suffered under the dictates of the Kremlin. File sharing enthusiasts often present themselves as members of an underground movement fighting â the rulers of the world corporationsâ and even a way to realize aspects of the communist utopia once promised to them. I show a number of technical and cultural similarities between the practices of Internet file sharing and those of Soviet samizdat, which I argue lead some Ukrainians to interpret the struggle against Western copyright as expression of political freedom and national identity. My findings suggest that scholars concerned with the use and social meaning of internet file sharing should not assume that a given technology or network will have the same meaning for users in all countries, but should be prepared to integrate their studies of information sharing behavior within a broader analysis of the social and national milieus in which they take place.

This preprint has been published in Human Dimensions of Wildlife 11(3) 2006. State wildlife agencies have little guidance about what Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) information to present on their Websites. This article describes four approaches to public information publication (private citizen view, attentive citizen view, deliberative citizen view, stakeholder publisher) that agency staff can employ to consider what CWD information to offer to the public.

This article explores the Internet as a resource for political information and communication in March 2003, when American troops were first sent to Iraq, offering us a unique setting of political context, information use, and technology. Employing a national survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project. We examine the political information behavior of the Internet respondents through an exploratory factor analysis; analyze the effects of personal demographic attributes and political attitudes, traditional and new media use, and technology on online behavior through multiple regression analysis; and assess the online political information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War. The factor analysis suggests four factors: activism, support, information seeking, and communication. The regression analysis indicates that gender, political attitudes and beliefs, motivation, traditional media consumption, perceptions of bias in the media, and computer experience and use predict online political information behavior, although the effects of these variables differ for the four factors. The information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War differed significantly. We conclude with a brief discussion of the value of "interdisciplinary poaching" for advancing the study of Internet information practices.

This is a preprint accepted for publication in Government Information Quarterly (2007) 24(1), pg. 64-88. This paper develops a framework to assess the text-based public information provided on program level government agency Websites. The framework informs the larger e-government question of how, or whether, state administrative agencies are using Websites in a transformative capacity - to change relationships between citizens and government. It focuses on assessing the degree to which text information provided on government Websites could facilitate various relationships between government agencies and citizens. The framework incorporates four views of government information obligations stemming from different assumptions about citizen-government relationships in a democracy: the private citizen view, the attentive citizen view, the deliberative citizen view and the citizen-publisher view. Each view suggests inclusion of different types of information. The framework is employed to assess state Websites containing information about Chronic Wasting Disease, a disease effecting deer and elk in numerous U.S. states and Canada.

The "collaboratory" concept has recently entered the vernacular of the scientific community to reflect new modes of scientific communication, cooperation and collaboration made possible by information technology. The collaborator represents a scientific research center "without walls" for accessing and sharing data, information, instrumentation and computational resources. The principal applications of the collaboratory concept have been in the physical and biological sciences, including space physics, oceanography and molecular biology. Discusses the attributes of the collaboratory, and applies the concept developed by computer and physical scientists to the design and operation of the SIPP ACCESS prototype information system for complex data to be used through the Internet by sociologists, demographers and economists. Examines obstacles to collaborator development for the social sciences. Concludes that four major obstacles will inhibit the development of collaboratories in the social sciences.