The announcement is going around that the peer-reviewed e-journal Library Philosophy and Practice has published a special issue, Libraries and Google. This reminds me of last year's Google and Libraries issue of Internet Reference Services Quarterly (Vol. 10. No. 3/4).

Libraries and Google. Google and Libraries. I sense a theme.

I blogged about this matter last year, and proposed the idea that such publications best belong on wikis because the wiki platform would keep these publications open to updates. And updates would clearly be important to any writings about ever-changing Google.

I got exasperated when I started reading Google and Libraries because the ground was shifting during the process of authorship. I decided that it wasn't worth my time to read something newly-published that was already out of date. In one chapter, for example, the authors were tracking the changing number of results for a search on Google Scholar in comparison with results on traditional scholarly databases. Their work is now two years old. What's the story these days?

My reading time is limited. I'm fiercely protective of it. Yet I also try to read as much as I can about the important things going on out there. So I ask myself, Is it worth reading the static issue Libraries and Google?

On the face of it, the issue looks interesting. It isn't entirely, or directly, all about Google ("Digg.com and Socially Driven Authority") but that's not the problem. The problem is, I want more. I want updates. I want something I can track. Why? Because at least two things about the content of these articles will change over time: 1) Google, and 2) the activities, attitudes and insights of the chapter authors. In other words, everything.

Let's explore the advantages of our two options: a static, completed issue, and an open-ended issue on a wiki-type platform.

It's worthwhile to publish a static issue of Library Philosophy and Practice because:

• This is a static journal and the issue needs to take its rightful place in the run of completed issues.
• Each issue represents a snapshot in time, in itself of historic value.
• Not all authors might be willing to update their content.
• Readers might not be willing to return to the publication to check the updates.
• Not all the articles might be worthy of being updated.
• The topics themselves will change, rendering these particular topics moribund after a while.
• There really isn't a great wiki platform out there that makes tracking updates a pleasant experience.
• The economic and maintenance model of keeping an issue open ad infinitum is not tenable.
• Hosting all these updates will take quite a commitment to digital preservation. Data migration is just one issue that comes to mind.
• Don't even talk to me about the problems of citing different versions of individual articles.

I didn't think I'd come up with such a long list. I'm impressed. If I keep thinking about it, I'm sure I could come up with even more.

It's worthwhile to publish an open-ended issue of Library Philosophy and Practice because:

• As Google (and many other rapidly-developing research topics) changes in character, many of these articles will soon go out of date and no one will read them.
• To optimize the reader's limited time, authors need to be maintaining the currency of their publications to make their articles worthy of being read in the first place - at least by people like me.
• Some of the authors writing about highly-charged, changeable topics are probably willing to undertake experiments with their publications, and in fact are probably frustrated by the requirement to bring their articles to a close.
• Without an open-ended publishing opportunity, some of the authors are unlikely to re-visit these topics in a publication, so we (and they) will miss out on tracking the reality of their professional evolution in a coherent, published format.
• Authors can close off their updates at will, based on the outdated usefulness of the topic, new research interests, fatigue, disinterest, etc.
• Some of the readers interested in these topics will likely be willing to track an evolving publication, if only for the curiosity factor.
• The journal itself, especially as an e-journal, is ripe for exploration of an alternative publishing model.
• Launching an open-ended publication will attract attention and possibly lead to improvements in the wiki format to optimize the new publishing model.
• The challenges of the preservation requirements might lead to new developments in digital preservation, possibly spilling over into other volatile areas of Web 2.0.
• APA, MLA and others will surely figure out how to cite different versions of the same article.
• It's time.

As some of you know, I'm editing a publication for ACRL, Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries. I call it a publication, rather than a book, because it's a hybrid affair. The initial release will be a book, and it will be followed by a wiki in which the authors will provide updates on the content of their chapters. In this case, all the authors are willing to participate in the wiki updates, some expressing high enthusiasm about the idea. I'm also counting on the curiosity factor I noted above to draw readers to our experiment.

There are authors in this field who publish books and then maintain Web sites of various kinds of provide supplementary materials and updates. I wasn't willing to do this independently. I wanted the updates to be integrated into the publication by the publisher. Enlightened staff at ACRL and ALA are making this happen. In other words, this is not an impossible dream.

I'm not meaning to pick on Library Philosophy and Practice or its Google issue. The situation just represents for me an intensification of a publishing problem that is becoming more acute as the topics of some of our scholarly pursuits undergo increasingly rapid change - and as the options for publishing about them become more varied, tempting and possible.

Addendum: There is one point that I neglected to make explicit: Library Philosophy and Practice may be an e-journal, but its static nature makes it equivalent to a print journal in its inflexibility as a publishing venue. Its only advantage is the Web-based distribution. As long as a publication is static, I think of it as something in print no matter what its hosting medium. The print model has moved online, nothing more.