I used to be a student of chess. While I was never very good, I appreciated the various ways of conceiving of the structure of the game. From myriad openings I could scarcely recall to middle-game tactics where I would sometimes find my footing, the game presented an uneven but undeniable progression towards a finality that ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of pieces coming off the board. There was typically a moment where the shift into the endgame—the endspiel is its formal name—would come and my heart rate would quicken as I realized I was simultaneously exposed defensively while confronted by offensive possibilities that demanded equal consideration. With fewer pieces left on the board, it always felt, paradoxically, much more difficult to calculate than in the middle game when the board was flush with pieces.
Academic libraries at smaller institutions often give me the same feeling lately, as if the endgame is beginning to dawn on the predominant model of librarianship. If the transition to the electronic library represented the opening moves of this current iteration of libraries, and the big deal and bundles and various subscriptions to fill out our portfolio of services the middle game, then unfilled positions, impossible forced choices, and an ever-shrinking value proposition give intimations of an approaching endgame.
This is not the end of academic libraries, which I know will endure for decades and even centuries. They will persist in some measure in some way, even should no changes be made and we plod our way to an ever-diminished form. But the model won’t really be viable, the services of today and yesterday really needed, or the funds close to sufficient to promise a renewal. Thus, I believe it is time to consider what the endgame means for us.
A NEW GAME DAWNS
Elsewhere recently I have written what I think the endgame looks like. We see the reality playing out across the US every year when layoffs of faculty, staff, and library personnel are announced. Quoting from the linked source above:
Amidst all the change that imminent or looming fiscal crises bring, leadership seldom stops to take stock of what is an increasingly fraught value proposition for the smaller academic library that is proving ever more expensive to keep delivering on the same mission. Stated more plainly, there is simply less library to go around against a backdrop of varying demand for traditional services from students, faculty, and staff. Beyond keeping the lights on and the dwindling subscriptions paid, a new mission and model for academic libraries is needed and a more open and automated future holds much promise for libraries willing to embrace a socially-driven future in a vastly more accessible and open scholarly realm.
At the core of my hopes for academic libraries is a recognition that our old ways of doing things is not so sure and that the potential for renewal lies in values-driven social engagement with known and as-yet-unknown stakeholders. My research agenda of the past 12 years on social capital, which culminated in an edited volume project I led on the social future of academic libraries, suggests a way forward. And in no small measure, it is this agenda, now transmuted into a consulting model I am testing quietly with college presidents and provosts at the moment, that I think represents a possible way forward.
There are so many prognostications about the future for academic libraries that it’s bewildering. Yet I think at root what our future amounts to is our willingness to take risks. As Bilbo cautions his nephew, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to” (Tolkien, LOTR).
This isn’t entirely true when it comes to organizations, but it’s not far off the mark. That is, to bring risk taking and organizational stasis as the endgame approaches a little closer, I would say that we resist the pull of uncertainty because of our reliance on the planning modes we live and breathe when it’s strategic planning season. But we rarely include scenarios thinking as we instead identify a destination, lay out some assumptions that the future will resemble the past closely, and set out our itinerary. This is not nothing, it takes leadership and courage to move organizations even this far. I’ve had a lot of successes as a leader in this regard but have struggled once or twice as well and have the utmost respect for the process and the people doing it.
The rub is that, with the endspiel in site, we, too, find ourselves confronted by a landscape that is moving faster than it previously did while the resources we had to marshall in our defense are fewer, and our offensive capabilities (read: values-driven social engagement) are often underdeveloped and even atrophied. Tony Horava writes in a recent article, adapting Thomas Kuhn’s constellation of beliefs, techniques, and values shared in a community: “In a library context, this constellation is typically conservative, reactive, and risk-averse” (p. 7).
In a sense, what I am advancing through my research and consulting work is that, to live into a future that we would choose for ourselves, however vague and formless from here in the present, will require us not only to align our values, services, and systems more closely and socially with vitally important stakeholders, but that we will need to embrace the reality of the endspiel. The endspiel reveals everything about the game as you have played it up until now, and my words are aimed more at libraries than chess:
- The strategic clarity of your game going forward is whittled down to the very essence of that particular game. We aren’t talking broad ranging strategies anymore, it’s a desperate rush to promote a pawn to a queen or utilizing your king actively rather than defensively.
- Here, it’s letting go of more and more legacy systems and practices in favor of what is simply emerging and making the emergent your strategy.
- Tactical depth speeds up and your intentions are harder to hide. You have perhaps won a position and have the slightest of advantages, but success comes down to knowledge of the opposition, contextualization/ triangulation, and envisioning how the game will move into distant parts of the board as the pieces get fewer and fewer.
- Here we determine what strengths we have, which positions we can win/hold as well as attributes we can develop, and recognize we are doing all of this in a shifting set of power dynamics. This also happens to be the base stuff of scenario planning.
- Theory counts for something but memory won’t serve. The theory of the endgame is well established but is not something you can memorize and rely on when you most need it. There are far too many combinations (eg, bishop versus rook) that each have their own exceptions to the rules. We realize that what worked in the middle game no longer applies at any level.
- Here, we enter the unintuitive zone where the real risk-taking starts. And the pressure is high and fatigue is setting in, just like in a long, pitched game of chess. I believe we are being asked to put our dwindling but ever-so-precious resources into a limited set of (old and new) baskets that we can assemble into some new value proposition.
CONCLUSION
It’s the new value proposition (see my article in Katina Magazine that came out today) we are playing for and our opponents are the threatening clouds on the horizon that loom in our minds as forces beyond our control. The win is not ours necessarily, it is the success of our students. But our endurance and perseverance as legit players in the game counts as a win, nonetheless. Until now, we have made a comfortable home in a part of the institutional chess board where our strategy has not yet required complex execution. Complicated, technically difficult? Yes. But not risky and not necessarily complex in the sense that B no longer follows A in 2025. Those days are coming to end and the value of every piece of our infrastructure and services still at our disposal is transforming while we look at an intersection of forces and causes that demand bolder responses.
- Horava, T. (2024). Risk taking in academic libraries: The implications of prospect theory. Library Leadership & Management, 28(2), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.5860/llm.v28i2.7055
- Tolkien, J. R. R. (2005). The lord of the rings. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (Original work published 1954–1955)
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