An organization’s mission is rooted in its analysis of user needs and, especially, in a vision of what those needs are going to be over the next five to ten years. Since our rebuilding project began in late 2013, we have been asking our subscribers to share their vision of the role of the library and of librarians ten years from now. Opinions have varied widely, but almost from the outset what struck the deepest cord with us was their concern about the decentering of the curatorial role of the librarian and, as corollaries to this, (1) the move toward more decentralized models of information discovery and consumption—through DDA, the open web, etc., (2) a growing emphasis on access rather than ownership, and (3) the continued growth of "unbundled" educational models, depending more on personalized learning and open educational resources. Each of these related issues seemed to imply a belief that in the future, information discovery and selection would increasingly be up to the end user, with a changed role for the librarian.
We asked these questions because we are concerned to know how Choice can stay relevant to the concerns of librarians. What we ultimately took away from our conversations was a conviction that even as some portion of information discovery and selection migrates to the end user, the curatorial functions traditionally performed by Choice—evaluation and recommendation—remain valuable. They might even be more valuable in that context, as the geometric growth in the number of available resources, and the extreme variations in their quality as a result, would make intelligent selection among them more difficult than ever. But valuable for whom? Today, we see our mission as supporting these functions in an expanded sense, not simply in collection development but in many of the scenarios in which other members of the academic community evaluate and select resources.
The rebuilding of Choice Reviews reflects that goal in both its design and its functionality. But building a new database is not the same thing as accomplishing our mission. At the end of the day, what is needed is nothing less than a change in the way people think about Choice. What do we mean by this? Ask a subscriber to say the first thing that comes into her head when she hears the word Choice and chances are the answer will be magazine. Digital subscribers are often the same, only they say online magazine. What we are hoping to do with the new Choice Reviews and future new products is break the familiar association of Choice with a magazine and migrate it instead to trusted publisher, or, even better, trusted source. If you regard our publications in that way, as tools that can be used by the entire library community to make better, more informed choices in the selection of materials, then we will have accomplished our mission. It’s time Choice came out from behind the desk and became the friend to a new generation of scholars and teachers, don’t you think?
