So I’m editing this journal issue and… - The Ubiquitous Librarian - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"I have been looking for an opportunity to work with Damon Jaggars for several years now. Last October we caught up at the Library Assessment Conference (here is the paper I presented) and worked out a plan for me to be a guest editor for a special issue of The Journal of Library Administration. For me, blog posts and whitepapers are the perfect vehicles of expression; however, I do like to dip into the more formal side of publishing every so often.   Here is a taste of the framework: 'Imagine academic libraries fifteen years from now or at some other inflection point. How do we define the academic library in this future? Where does the library begin and end relative to research and academic computing, and other campus and network services that will be available to faculty and students?  How will higher education change and how will the academic library align with that change? What will the curriculum look? How will scholarship be defined? Will current large-scale collaborative efforts (DPN, HathiTrust, shared single-copy repositories, etc.) create the efficiencies and preservation infrastructure they promise? How will we define collections? What will a globally networked library look like? How will we use information differently? What will learning and productivity spaces look like? What services might emerge? What aspects of collection building and service provision are no longer necessary?   This special issue explores the possibilities of what libraries might become or cease to be. Experts from different sectors of academia, publishing, technology, and design will share their thoughts, dreams, fears, and hopes about the future. The intention is to produce insights that ignite the imagination — to leapfrog the adjacencies of the coming years and land on a strategic plateau of the near future. This is an opportunity to speculate on the arriving advances as well as to warn of potential loss due to these changes.'     I took my inspiration from J.J. Abrams when he guest edited an issue of Wired. It is a very personal project for me. I wanted to create an issue about libraries that I would want to read— one that I wished would show up in my inbox. It would cover ideas and topics that I get excited about — issues that library leaders will be dealing with for the next several decades.   Damon joked that this was shaping up to be the 'science fiction' issue, but he believed in it. In fact, he scheduled it for August 2013.   I decided to make this invitation-only. There was a particular vision that I was striving to curate and so I targeted authors from specific sectors: librarians, academics, and industry. Here is the lineup ..."