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NatureServe represents a network of affiliates, known as natural heritage programs or conservation data centers, operating in all U.S. states and Canadian provinces and several Latin American and Caribbean countries. Network members send detailed information on the conservation status and location of plants, animals, and ecological communities—as well as references for that information—from their local databases to NatureServe's national office, where it is compiled in a central database. There are currently nearly 570,000 citations in the central database, and published books and journal articles make up only about one-fifth of the total. The rest represent a wide variety of unpublished and undigitized sources, including reports from governmental and nongovernmental entities, field survey forms, old maps, and various ephemera such as memos and personal communications.

An analysis is under way to determine the usefulness and feasibility of exposing (1) metadata about this reference database and (2) selected attributes of the data on the web. One challenge is the fact that the NatureServe is not the owner of the data. The organization maintains data sharing agreements with all the affiliated programs that specify how data they send to NatureServe may be used, and these agreements currently do not address the proposed project. Another challenge is that reference records may contain sensitive information (e.g., notes about the location of an endangered species), and at present it is not known whether this concern can be addressed simply by excluding certain attributes.

The first step to improving access to gray literature is to identify the pertinent literature that exists. Web exposure of NatureServe's centralized citation database could contribute to this end. The ultimate goal would be to provide digital access to nonsensitive literature, perhaps through partnerships with organizations such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library and others with an interest in digitizing both published and unpublished literature linked not only to occurrence records but to standard observation protocols for documenting conservation status, phenology, community composition and classification, conservation site design, and ecosystem changes over time.