Connecting.
A NY Times article on NYPL's Lessig and Jeff Tweedy discussion about "Who Owns Culture" reports,
Mr. Lessig and the moderator, Steven Johnson, a contributing editor at Wired, made much of the fact that the discussion was taking place in a library, where much of the Western cultural canon is available free.
Sitting with my blogger friends, a friend from law school and my fellow librarians I was struck by how NYPL acted as a connector. The library isn't just about making materials available for free-- we're about connecting users to what they need. We figure out why a user might not have access to what they need-- a book, a computer, computer skills, research skills, and then we try to bridge their lack of access.
We connect people to the information they need, the skills they need to access the information, and we connect users to each other.
I've heard so many times that google or Borders or Netflix or Napster or whatever... is going to make libraries obsolete. Rather, these new companies and technologies just make it easier for us to be connectors-- they won't make us obsolete, they'll make us better.