Fringe or Grey Literature in the National Library

On "Papyrolatry" and the Growing Similarity Between the Materials in Libraries and Archives

The amassing of a national collection of books and related materials has been a continuing objective ever since the enactment of the first legal deposit law, the Ordonnance de Montpellier of 1537. There are various degrees of comprehensiveness, from deposit only in connection with copyright, to deposit of all printed information (and, by analogy, information in any other medium). The information revolution of the twentieth century is closely associated with the media revolution, and by 1984 permanent preservation of all information in national repositories has become a utopian goal. Modern reprography and new media have changed the materials of archives and libraries and complicated the distinction between them. Reprography has created problems of definition for Scandinavian national libraries, whose collections are based on deposit from printers. Much of the grey, or non-conventional, literature that is presently being discussed by information scientists can be identified as documents that were formerly reserved for the archives. It is suggested that archivists and librarians cooperate in defining their fields of collection and in revising their methodologies in the light of new technology, in order to cope with the massive amounts of material.