Digital curation of public policy resources: discovery, access and management for policy and practice

Abstract

This paper discusses public policy and grey literature use and management and the work of Australian Policy Online in developing its open access document and data digital library. Public policy and practice relies on a wide range of resources, including traditional scholarly publications, and those produced directly by organisations, such as reports, discussion papers, briefings, reviews and data sets produced by government, academic centres, non-government organisations (NGOs), think tanks and companies. While heavily used, the collection and curation of digital publications (grey literature) is dispersed, inefficient and inadequate. This paper presents recent research on use, production and collection of policy publications and discusses the approach of Policy Online, a digital library that uses a variety of tools including crowd-sourcing content, linked data approaches, Digital Object Identifiers and more.