Conclusion

In looking ahead, balancing legacy obligations with the future, especially a digital future, will always challenge HCL, as it is the oldest academic library in North America.

• We will still build exceptional research collections.
• We face the huge task of preservation of materials in all formats.
• We will make more of our collections “findable” to users—through HOLLIS, OASIS, HGL, VIA. We share a concern with other large research libraries about our “hidden collections” (those special, rare, and unique collections that lack adequate bibliographic access).
• We will continue to assess where and how we interact with users—looking into how we extend our capability to handle reference questions and to teach users to work with a growing array of specialized resources.

We do not know what teaching will be like in the future, or what libraries will be like in the future, but we know there will be teaching and learning and that libraries should be a part of that. We also know that each fall there will be new students, each year there will be new digital content and new technologies to master, each year there will be requests from faculty for something we could not have anticipated, and each year we will have hundreds of HCL staff who do superb work in multiple languages, using multiple online systems, communicating with countries around the world, ensuring strong collections, and making sure the students and faculty can use them successfully.