No wonder non-librarians have trouble envisioning a future for us. We don't really enable discovery; people turn to their local library to procure things they identified elsewhere. We don't curate or organize knowledge; we license packages of it curated and organized by others. We do help students navigate it all, but it's misleading to say we're promoting information literacy. We're teaching college literacy, helping students compete assignments by showing them how to find content that will become unavailable the minute they graduate. This is why Mita's alternative sounds so much more exciting. It's a return to what we originally cared about.

Read more: Barbara Fister Inside Higher Ed