These are the points that stuck with me after Paul Courant's presentation last Friday...

• The Library always needs to answer the questions, "how do we serve the interests of scholarship and of the university as a whole?" The Library doesn't need to ask/answer the question, "how do we preserve the library?"

I wonder if "the interests of scholarship" and "the interests of the university as a whole" are congruent sets? or if the interests of scholarship is actually larger than any single university and might be better addressed with a larger focus?

•  Libraries have traditionally provided and need to continue to provide two all-important functions: 1) ensure today's and tomorrow's readers reliable access to the exact items authors have referenced before, and 2) document the provenance of each item.

In the e-world of changing url's; broken links; disappearing websites; born digital material; postings to individual websites, institutional repositories, and national repositories; re-tooling this function should keep us busy. Oh, and keep the print. And what about those datasets?

• There might be a useful distinction to be made between "information" and "artifact".

Perhaps not all materials need be retained as artifact -- and if this is true, perhaps there are cheaper more efficient ways to handle "information". How would we talk about this? and where would we start?