When the library was established, it was built on a reservoir model. It was meant to serve as a comprehensive repository of knowledge. But there is a conceptual shift happening today moving away from libraries as catch-all repositories toward libraries as nodes in a larger network. Each institution has to figure out the unique role it can play in strengthening that network: through technical and financial contributions, community participation, and their particular collecting, preservation, and outreach strategies — the unique work they do as libraries. Working at the New York Public Library (NYPL) made me only more convinced that pre-digital age institutions have a critical role to play in building the modern information ecosystem: because of the unique assets they hold, but also their values and perspective. It’s about taking the long view, and a commitment to the reliability and persistence of information that’s largely absent in the constant digital churn we live in today. We were always thinking about our work within this larger context of evolving infrastructures. That this is a generational, maybe multigenerational, project of migrating knowledge (and values) to a new context, hopefully without losing those roots, and without abandoning the physical, the hard copy.