Bringing the Grey Literature Out of the Shadows: The Demise of a Technical Report Database Silo Willow Dressel, Engineering and Plasma Physics Librarian, Princeton University Introduction The Library at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) started in the 1950s in the early years of the lab. In the beginning, the collection primarily consisted of theoretical papers in the form of either technical reports or journal articles. In the 1960s the first librarian, Elizabeth “Betty” Graydon, was hired. Betty, assisted by summer students, built a card catalog of the holdings of the library. * The card catalog was not just a record of the library’s holdings, but a local index of the literature in plasma physics and controlled fusion. Being one of the only Department of Energy laboratories solely devoted to research in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, the library has always attempted to maintain as complete a collection of relevant literature as possible. Materials collected by the library were largely in the form of technical reports and journal articles. Incoming journals were thoroughly examined and card catalog records created for individual articles as well as technical reports and other materials. The Plasma Physics Library Catalog (PPLCat) was started on July 1, 1986 to continue to provide bibliographic citations to the library’s technical reports, journal articles, and conference proceedings. The back catalog of technical reports produced by PPPL was added to PPLCat. Although the library had access to the Energy Citations Database through Dialog, librarians felt it was important to maintain the tradition of having a local index of the literature. Monographs, journal holdings, and similar materials were now a part of Princeton University Library’s online GEAC catalog.* Around 2000, PPLCat was moved to a Microsoft Access database and a web interface was created bringing the collection online and making it more visible. A sample record from PPLCat. An aging database. By 2005 the only materials being added to PPLCat were the technical reports received in print at the library. Proprietary and public databases had become more reliable, timely, and comprehensive gateways in to the literature and individual journal articles had reached a critical mass where maintaining a local database was too cumbersome. At the same time many laboratories in the field stopped the expensive process of mailing print copies of reports and began posting digital copies online, including PPPL itself. As of 2005, all new PPPL technical reports were made available on the lab’s website. *“History of the Plasma Physics Library: Growth by Decade (1960-current)”, n.d. http://www.pppl.gov/library/History/history.html. Abstract At the Furth Library in the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), staff have been using a Microsoft Access database called PPLCat to keep track of a variety of materials held in the library including technical reports and journal articles since 1985. The database has grown outdated, is slow to use, and has limited functionality compared to newer publicly available databases. Working with librarians from the Library Systems and Cataloging departments, a project was developed to identify and transfer relevant records from PPLCat into Princeton’s main library catalog. In 2009 the Access database was starting to show its age. Little new material was being added and many of the advanced search features of the web interface no longer worked. It went from being a valued local bibliographic database, to a separate inventory of technical reports holdings. As the library started to look at new discovery systems, these types of local inventories began to be seen as unnecessary silos of information. In addition, the programmer who designed PPLCat was retiring and his replacement would not be expected to support the database after he was gone. Transferring records to the Main Catalog: XML to the rescue Thanks to XML, PPLCat records cou