Against The Grain is not your typical library-related serial.

Last year I had the opportunity to present at the 27th Annual Charleston Conference where I shared my ideas regarding the future of search and how some of those ideas can implemented in “next-generation” library catalogs. In appreciation of my efforts I was given a one-year subscription to Against The Grain. From the website’s masthead:

Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. It is a unique collection of reports on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals. ATG is published on paper six times a year, in February, April, June, September, and November and December/January.

I try to read the issues as they come out, but I find it difficult. This not because the content is poor, but rather because the there is so much of it! In a few words and phrases, Against The Grain is full, complete, dense, tongue-in-cheek, slightly esoteric, balanced, graphically challenging and at the same time graphically interesting, informative, long, humorous, supported by advertising, somewhat scholarly, personal, humanizing, a realistic reflection of present-day librarianship (especially in regards to technical services in academic libraries), predictable, and consistent. For example, the every issue contains a “rumors” article listing bunches and bunches of people, where they are going, and what they are doing. Moreover, the articles are printed in a relatively small typeface in a three-column format. Very dense. To make things easier to read, sort of, all names and titles are bolded. I suppose the dutiful reader could simply scan for names of interest and read accordingly, but there are so many of them. (Incidentally, the bolded names pointed me to the Tenth Fiesole Retreat which piqued my interest because I had given a modified SIG-IR presentation on MyLibrary at the Second Fiesole Retreat. Taking place at Oxford, that was a really cool meeting!)

Don’t get me wrong. I like Against The Grain but it so full of information and has been so thoroughly put together that I feel almost embarrassed not reading it. I feel like the amount of work put into each issue warrants the same amount of effort on my part to read it.

The latest issue (volume 20, number 3, June 2008) includes a number of articles about Google. For me, the most interesting articles included:

• “Kinda just like Google” by Jimmy Ghaphery – an examination of the number of search targets appearing on ARL library home pages. Almost all of them include a search of the catalog. Just fewer have searches of meta-search engines. Just fewer than that are pages including searches of Google and its relatives, and just fewer than that, if not non-existent, were searches of locally created indexes like institution repositories or digital collections. Too many search boxes?
• “Giggling Over Google” by Lilia Murray – a description of how Google Docs and Google Custom Search engines can be used and harnessed in libraries. Well-documented. Well-written. Advocates the creation of more Custom Search Engines by librarians. Sounds like a great idea to me.
• “Keeping the Enemy Close” by John Wender – compares and contrasts the advantages and disadvantages of including/supporting Google Scholar in an academic library setting. I liked the allusion to Carl Shapiro and Hall Varian’s idea of “information as an ‘experience good'”. Kinda like, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
• “Measuring the ‘Google Effect’ at JSTOR by Bruce Heterick – a description of how JSTOR’s usage skyrocketed after its content was indexed by Google.
• “Prescription vs. Description in the information-seeking process, or should we encourage our patrons to use Google Scholar?” by Bruce Sanders – contrasts “prescription” and “description” librarianship. One encourages competent, sophisticated searching of databases. The other tailors the library Website to make the patron search strategies as effective as possible. An interesting comparison.
• “Medium rare books, PODS wars, instant books brought to you by algorithms” by John D. Riley – describes how a fortune of books was found in the stacks of the Forbes Library as opposed to the library’s special collections.

If you have the time, spent it reading Against The Grain.