Grey literature fills in gaps in the information landscape by offering a range of perspectives outside the scholarly publication cycle. Resources in academic libraries focus on peer-reviewed books and articles. Authors of these materials have to prefer book and article specific formats as the venue for their work. They must also have education and employment credentials that evidence them as authorities on a subject. Publishing in journals has moved to a model requiring significant added processing charges when the author wishes their work to be open access and this is posing a financial barrier for authors without grant or institutional funding. Institutions and governments worldwide do not publish in these commercial venues so their information must be located in a variety of ways.
Many voices are missing from peer-reviewed sources within journal literature. For this reason, you must TRACE other sources using Thorough Research Across Customized Environments. Examples of these environments include:
“... requires researchers to identify their own degrees of privilege through factors of race, class, educational attainment, income, ability, gender, and citizenship, among others, … [in order to] understand how their way of making meaning, of framing research, within their conceptual
universe is tied to their positionality within an unjust world.” (Duarte, p. 135)
Your worldview, background, and equity lens I-EDIAA (Indigenization, equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, anti-racist) influences:
● Your assumptions
● What is researched
● Who participates (team & participants)
● Selection of methods
● Selection of information sources
● How research is conducted
● How research analyzed
● How research is interpreted
● Who results are shared with
● Where results are shared and published
Duarte, M. E. (2017). Network sovereignty: Building the internet across Indian country. University of Washington Press. (chapter: Decolonizing the technological: describes the meaning of positionality from an Indigenous perspective).