The Expanding Mission:
Why the reward for adaptability is often more responsibility
While reading the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2025, I expected to spend most of my time thinking about artificial intelligence. Like many people working in higher education, I am interested in how emerging technologies will affect teaching, learning, research, and student success. The report provides plenty of material for those conversations. Yet by the time I reached the end, I found myself reflecting on something else because that is where my mind resides lately.
What stayed with me wasn’t the discussion of artificial intelligence, but the recurring theme of institutional expectation.
Throughout the report, library leaders describe a growing set of responsibilities that now fall within the library’s sphere of influence. Artificial intelligence, digital literacy, research integrity, student success, accessibility, open educational resources, workforce readiness, and community engagement all appear as areas where libraries are expected to contribute meaningful leadership and support. None of these priorities are surprising. Actually, many align closely with values that libraries have a long history of embracing. What struck me wasn’t the nature of the work itself, but the cumulative weight of it…and what brought me back to workday reality was the ping of notifications for new email.
I’ve learned since my earliest workdays at Frost Library at Amherst College that a characteristic that library leaders aim for is adaptability. Libraries have evolved alongside changes in scholarship, technology, and student needs for generations. We adopt to the rise of electronic resources, transform physical spaces into learning commons, expand support for digital scholarship, and incorporate information literacy into broader conversations about student learning, and even merge what were previously independent student support units into one department. Adaptation is not new to the profession. It is, in many ways, one of its defining strengths.
But that strength can create its own challenges.
Organizations that consistently demonstrate an ability to adapt often find themselves entrusted with increasingly complex responsibilities, and spoiler alert: little or no new financial support to address the new responsibility. Because libraries have repeatedly shown a willingness to evolve, academic institutions frequently look to them when new challenges emerge. Questions about misinformation become information literacy initiatives, digital fluency concerns become instructional opportunities, and now conversations about artificial intelligence are drifting towards become teaching and learning partnerships. The pattern is understandable. Libraries sit at the intersection of information, learning, and student support. They are natural collaborators in many of the issues facing higher education today.
As I reflected on the report, I found myself returning to an observation that extends well beyond libraries:
The reward for adaptability is often additional responsibility.
At first glance, this seems like a compliment. Organizations that are trusted receive more opportunities to contribute. Effective teams are invited into important conversations. Successful units become partners in solving institutional problems.
But responsibility and capacity are not the same thing.
The work that libraries performed yesterday does not disappear because new priorities emerge. Students who need help evaluating AI-generated information still need help conducting research, faculty exploring new technologies still require instructional support, collection development, and access to course materials. Assessment responsibilities continue — I mean, have you taken a walk recently in your library’s stacks and found current medical texts pre-dating Covid? (I’m embarrassed to share that I have). Budgets still require oversight. Buildings still need to operate. Existing services remain essential even as new services are introduced.
The challenge is that responsibility often expands more quickly than capacity.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that some of the most difficult leadership conversations are not about identifying worthwhile initiatives. Most leaders are capable of recognizing important opportunities. The harder conversation is determining what an organization must stop doing, delay, reduce, or deprioritize in order to make room for something new. Yes, I’m saying it…what do we “take off the plate.” Something needs to come off the plate when that new opportunity is continuously pushing capacity.
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Those conversations are rarely celebrated; I think they should be. And celebrated often.
Innovation receives attention because it signals progress. New initiatives create momentum. Strategic plans often emphasize what will be added rather than what may need to change. Yet sustainable leadership requires confronting trade-offs. Every new responsibility carries costs in time, expertise, attention, and organizational energy. Those costs exist whether additional resources accompany the responsibility or not.
This is where the Ithaka report becomes particularly interesting for me. While discussions about artificial intelligence have understandably received significant attention, I found myself equally interested in the barriers library leaders identified. Staffing limitations. Financial constraints. Competing priorities. Limited organizational capacity. These challenges appear repeatedly throughout the report, not as secondary concerns but as persistent realities shaping what libraries are able to accomplish.
Those findings point toward a broader issue within higher education.
Many institutional challenges are framed as innovation problems. We need a new initiative, or a new technology to upgrade, or a new service, or a new strategy to address a new issue or concern. Sometimes those solutions are necessary, but many organizational challenges are not fundamentally problems of innovation. They are problems of capacity.
The distinction matters because the solutions are different.
Do we celebrate, do we acknowledge that innovation asks what should happen next, and capacity asks whether we are prepared to do it well.
This is not an argument against innovation. I am so far removed from the back in my day mentality. Nor is it a complaint about expanding expectations. Many of the issues now being placed before libraries are exactly the kinds of challenges we should be helping institutions address. Libraries have important contributions to make in conversations about student success, digital literacy, ethical technology use, workforce preparation, and lifelong learning.
I can’t find an image of a man yelling at a cloud that I like, so imagine one here:
(Imagine that image; imagining you imagining this is actually giving me a chuckle, btw).
Rather, it is an argument for organizational honesty.
Institutions should be honest about what new priorities require. Leaders should be honest about trade-offs. Organizations should be honest about capacity. Most importantly, we should recognize that assigning responsibility is not the same thing as creating readiness.
Preparing an organization to address emerging challenges requires more than confidence in its people. It requires investment in professional development, staffing, infrastructure, systems, and time. It requires creating conditions where adaptation remains sustainable rather than simply expected.
The future challenges facing higher education are real. Artificial intelligence is real. Workforce transformation is real. Changes in student expectations are real. The need for information literacy, digital literacy, and research support remains real. Libraries will continue to play an important role in helping institutions navigate those challenges because they have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to adapt. Yet adaptation itself should not be mistaken for capacity.
If there is a lesson I carried away from the Ithaka report, it is that the most important leadership questions are not always about what organizations can do. Sometimes they are about what organizations need in order to continue doing it well.
There is a meaningful difference between believing an organization is capable of solving institutional problems and ensuring it has the resources necessary to succeed.
