Grey literature online: the GLC experience

Abstract

I can remember quite clearly the scene in the information officers' room at the Research Library in County Hall, the morning after the 1981 GLC elections—what an age ago it seems. There was the Members' information officer having a clear‐out, ditching piles of paper. ‘Airships—out! Olympic Games—out! CB radio—out!’ he sang as he bent with a will to his work. What he was doing was disposing of the bumph accumulated during the lifetime of the previous administration, reams of data collected for the benefit of the outgoing GLC, or acquired at the request of individual Members with bees in their bonnets about one subject or another, who had now fallen in battle. At the same time as the detritus of the previous four years was being swilled away, other hands were already bending to the task of assiduously garnering more bumph on the new ‘in’ topics—control of the police, ethnic minorities, cheap fares. And it is possible that in about three years from now we will be engaged in precisely the same operation in reverse. It's a slightly fanciful picture, but it is a fair comment on the way we operate; not so much ‘expand or die’ (though we do that when we can) as ‘respond or die’. The new administration, of whatever political colour, has its own new ideas that it wants to put into operation as quickly as possible, and it's our job to provide the necessary supporting information as rapidly as we can. What has gone before is largely so much water under the bridge. That's how we view our terms of reference.