10th April 2010, 01:18 PM
How 1970s! - am sitting next to a shelf of Lovecraft but sadly don't have the time to check for you this weekend....
Steven - we're talking most/all of northern England. Hundreds of WSIs from just this one office have gone through the system over the years with the 'if appropriate' and no one has ever queried it, and I've seen plenty of WSIs from other companies using the same phrase, so appears pretty standard up here. You must benefit down south from a rather wider supply of publication outlets, even bulletins and county annual magazines up here (which are all aimed at the public/interested amateurs and hence require at least some interest value) would baulk at publishing accounts of monitoring BT augering-in holes for replacement telegraph poles, sewer collapse repairs etc, we've even done one job monitoring guys pulling out fenceposts (don't ask!) and I once had a slightly pointless day out monitoring EH screwing a sign to a modern wall (marked as such in their own guidebook plan - yes, there is a report somewhere amongst the grey literature)....sadly these days that's the sort of thing that a large proportion of the workload consists of.
As various people have pointed out above, all the info's freely available via the HERS, the main issue is really the fact that it costs money to use them, ok for commercial professionals who are using them a lot anyway (I always try to sneak the odd 'oh, while I'm here is it ok if I look at....' onto the client's budget), but a bit of a put-off for academics and the interested non-professionals. Of course, it would help if more academics actually demonstrated that they had any awareness of the grey literature in the first place - took the greatest delight several years ago in emailing a certain senior university academic a bibliography for a site that had apparently just been 'discovered' from new APs and syndicated as such across a fair number of newspapers, even worse the biblio included a published source and old HER AP plotting both from the 1980s....
Steven - we're talking most/all of northern England. Hundreds of WSIs from just this one office have gone through the system over the years with the 'if appropriate' and no one has ever queried it, and I've seen plenty of WSIs from other companies using the same phrase, so appears pretty standard up here. You must benefit down south from a rather wider supply of publication outlets, even bulletins and county annual magazines up here (which are all aimed at the public/interested amateurs and hence require at least some interest value) would baulk at publishing accounts of monitoring BT augering-in holes for replacement telegraph poles, sewer collapse repairs etc, we've even done one job monitoring guys pulling out fenceposts (don't ask!) and I once had a slightly pointless day out monitoring EH screwing a sign to a modern wall (marked as such in their own guidebook plan - yes, there is a report somewhere amongst the grey literature)....sadly these days that's the sort of thing that a large proportion of the workload consists of.
As various people have pointed out above, all the info's freely available via the HERS, the main issue is really the fact that it costs money to use them, ok for commercial professionals who are using them a lot anyway (I always try to sneak the odd 'oh, while I'm here is it ok if I look at....' onto the client's budget), but a bit of a put-off for academics and the interested non-professionals. Of course, it would help if more academics actually demonstrated that they had any awareness of the grey literature in the first place - took the greatest delight several years ago in emailing a certain senior university academic a bibliography for a site that had apparently just been 'discovered' from new APs and syndicated as such across a fair number of newspapers, even worse the biblio included a published source and old HER AP plotting both from the 1980s....