Yesterday, I was talking with another participant from the Readex Digital Institute that I attended last week. I had to leave a day early, unfortunately, and my friend made the following, fascinating comment:

[W]e had a really robust and refreshingly honest wrap up discussion. Voices from unexpected corners (particularly the small private college libraries) echoed many of your [...] sentiments -- actually, these folks seem to be 'over it' much more readily than the big research libraries are. Maybe because their missions, as tuition-driven teaching institutions, are just a lot clearer and crisper. The larger research libraries seem to have a lot more baggage because of multiple and at-times conflicting elements of their missions -- research, teaching, service.

This really struck a bell for me. And on a cognitive tangent, I immediately thought about all of the highly-visible, opinion-shaping librarians who are blogging, and for the first time, I noticed something eerie. Whoever you put on your list -- Meredith, Jessamyn, Sarah, John, Jenny, Dorothea -- they largely either came out of, or still work at, non-R1 research universities. Even the bloggers that at least nominally represent R1 libraries -- maybe myself, Lorcan, Roy, Karen, and a few others -- we're predominantly at "extra-territorial" organizations.

I think this is incredibly striking. Part of me wonders if the heft of a research library -- its tremendous work capacity -- partially shields it from the changes surging through the society. I know many R1 staff see the changes -- indeed, so do many of their Directors. Often though, I sense a slower search for accommodation, a winding path towards adjustment, whereas the smaller, nimbler libraries are already embracing the present, and forging the future. Maybe the R1 libraries are so expertly competent at prior generation library activities -- another Institutional Repository here; another digital archive there -- that more fundamental change, like organizational re-shaping, seems less necessarily imminent. Every bureaucracy is stagnant at its own level, so the inertia is not purely that, but the tendering of my friend's observation about mission complexity surely weighs also.

Yet even in the R1s where I see and hear transformations lurking around the corner, where are the voices?

Am I missing them, or are they locked away in the caverns of the buildings? Why is this chorus missing?