It is a pleasure and privilege to have been asked to participate in “Climbing
Out of the Box: Repackaging Libraries for Survival” and to contribute to
this collection of articles. We are in the very early stages of a dramatic
transformation, where the primary mechanism for transmitting knowledge is
shifting from print on paper to digits on the wire. The fundamental challenge
facing all of us who operate in the scholarly communications environment is
that the infrastructure that has served us so well for centuries is not optimized
for storing, preserving and disseminating knowledge in digital form.