It is somewhat traditional for RUSA presidents to focus their final From the President column on the future of RUSA and the profession. I think that the future of librarianship is, as ever, strong and exciting. In ten years we may not be doing what we are doing right now, but we have always looked for the best ways to serve our patrons, and that often means change. Our core mission--finding, organizing, accessing, and sharing information and resources--is always going to be a requirement of the world. As long as we navigate the future with our values as our compass, as long as we are open to change and can manifest that change, we will be fine. In fact, we will be more than fine. No matter the methods of change, we will continue to buy the books that light up the world for readers, point readers to them, and share their delight. We will continue to support the researcher who one day finds the clue that leads to the cure for cancer. We will build bridges between patrons, technology, and collections and help our users explore the vast resources our predecessors helped construct. No one creates or invents anything in a vacuum. Every author, scholar, or inventor who has ever changed the world has done so through the sparks of ideas gained from a vibrant curiosity about, and engagement with, the world. Librarians are the Virgils in this process--the guides, finders, sorters, and arrangers of all that possibility. As indispensable light, we will be fine. It is that role and mission that energizes me about RUSA's future as well. We also can look toward a horizon that is exciting and full of potential. As we have done for decades, and as we will continue to do for decades more, we shape and guide the profession through the thousands of gifted librarians willing to lend their expertise and labor to the process. Because RUSA is dynamic and open to ideas and change, it is very hard to say what we will look like tomorrow, much less five or ten years from now. However, I think there are some areas we are thinking about today that will bear fruit in the future. VIRTUAL At the 2009 Midwinter Meeting and the Annual Conference, RUSA experimented with having committees meet completely in a virtual setting. I think we will continue this trend as schedules and budgets make it more and more difficult to justify face-to-face meetings for all but the most critical of reasons. I think we are going to start asking if we can meet our needs via conference calls, videoconferences, or some yet-to-be invented online tool. Sooner rather than later, we are going to look around the room at some conference and ask ourselves if what we just did in an hour was worth the travel time and costs. When it is not, we will change our default of meeting in person to meeting virtually, and that will not only change how RUSA works, it will change who is willing to serve on committees and open RUSA to a whole new set of expert members who are currently shut out of the process because of a lack of financial support. CONTENT BEYOND CONFERENCE As wonderful as ALA conferences are, not every RUSA member attends, and not everyone who could benefit from our content belongs to RUSA or ALA. Part of our growth as an association and our influence on our profession depends on us sharing what we know as widely as possible. To do that, we need to push our content outward. At the Midwinter Meeting and Annual Conference we made a small but important first step in this direction--we recorded events and programs and made them available to anyone who was interested. I think that, over time, this will become commonplace, and much if not all of our programming will one day be captured and archived. I look forward to the day when our content is as widely available and sought after as the TED Talks. SHARING THE WEALTH The Public Library Association (PLA) recently moved to create communities of interest instead of a formal committee structure. …
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Mar 17, 2023
Bernadette A Lear 
Open Access