Still “Choosing Our Futures”: How Many Apples in the Seed?

Abstract

James G. Neal is University Librarian Emeritus at Columbia University; e-mail: jneal@columbia.edu. © 2015 James G. Neal, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist and poet, noted in his Journals1 that “sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” Perhaps the authors of the remarkable paper “Choosing Our Futures” were inspired by Emerson’s rumination. This 1996 article is a provocation, a call to arms for the academic library community, a challenge to complacency, an insightful and inciteful spur to fundamental change. In the context of extraordinary economic pressures, the early transformation of scholarly communication, new thinking about the role and nature of higher education, rampant technological innovation, rapidly shifting user behaviors and expectations, the authors confront the classic debate on the nature of transformation. Will it be incremental, evolutionary, or revolutionary? They also flirt with the prospect of extinction: that is, will it be terminal, the demise of the academic library, or will it be phyletic, the library surviving by progressing to a new species? Why was the “Choosing Our Futures” essay important in 1996, and why is it still compelling today? Published nearly twenty years ago, and presented through the lens of the authors’ experiences at the University of Arizona, the paper encourages us to think about the multifaceted character of organizational transformation. What do we mean by transform: to change in composition or structure, what we are and what we do? to change in outward form or appearance, how we are viewed and understood? and to change in character or condition, how we do it? The authors are responsive to two cautions. Subjective perceptions are at least as important as the actual facts. And, in the short run, change is always less than expected—but, in the long run, always more than anticipated. Khalil Gibran, the poet and writer, tells us that “progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.”2 And Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, reminds us that “the transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition can emerge is far from a cumulative process.”3 This paper captures the essence of these two important concepts. The basic premise of the paper was that “every assumption, task, activity, relationship, and/or structure needed to be challenged.” The authors advance a constancy of purpose, building on Jesse Shera’s point that the role of libraries is to “maximize the social utility of graphic records.” Even from the perspective of the mid-1990s, they see the shifting and increasingly schizophrenic vision of the academic library. They could not have understood the future impact of such developments as the web, social media, the cloud, mobile technologies, big data, 3-D printing, visualization, and all the rest. But they recognize the importance of legacy, infrastructure, repository, portal, enterprise, and public interest as part of the continuing mandate. Theirs is a clarion appeal for innovation, for new ideas, methods, and products. They call for the systematic application of new knowledge to new resources to produce new goods and new services,