the critical library role of providing online access

Librarianship - much ado about inventory?

This is a problem, because in the digital world, every time your patrons fail to access a resource that is available to them through your library, you have failed.

library = community access to reusable stuff
museum = community access to unique stuff
archive = nobody/privileged access to important stuff

It seems to me that properties of the physical world created a mind trap for librarians.

Community in the physical world is about place - if you build it, they will come.  Community is a side-effect of the physical library as people aggregator.

Access in the physical world is so transparent that it's hard to even think about it.  Librarian hands patron a book.  Voila, the access problem, solved.

Reusable is a function of the definition of the library itself - if it wasn't something that could be reused, the library wouldn't hold it.  The library of gasoline and firecrackers might be an exciting place, but I don't think it would stay in business very long.

Stuff is the core of the physical library.  It is so central to the physical library mission that I think for many librarians and for the field of librarianship, it became the sole mission.  Just managing a large inventory of objects was legitimately a challenging task in the physical world, particularly before electronic inventory systems.

Digital turns this all on its head. Let's get back to this "fail to access" statement.
What I'm saying is, don't worry about fancy library 2.0 OPAC whatever.
In the digital world you must have as your core mission providing access.
Anywhere, any time, that a patron encounters a resource that you license, they should automatically get access to it.

Instead, day in and day out, patrons 1) have no idea that resources have been licensed for them and 2) fail to access licensed resources - fail in the sense of "are unable to" or don't know how to, etc.

There's a thing called Government of Canada Central NewsDesk.  Free licensed access to pretty much every newspaper in Canada, as well as Canadian magazines etc.  I'm willing to bet 99% of government employees have no idea this exists.  I'm willing to bet that day after day, they say to their colleagues "I would send you that Globe article, but it's not available free online", when in fact, they have full licensed access.  This is an appalling failure of the library.

The fact that every single link in Google News and Google News Archive doesn't automatically have a link that says "click here for access provided by your library" is a tragedy.

Providing automatic access for patrons to licensed resources wherever and whenever they search should be the single highest priority of libraries until it is so deeply embedded in every discovery system that it is taken for granted.

Think about the competitive space you're in.  "Reusable stuff" is practically the definition of online content (excluding the hopeless DRM efforts that try to prevent this).  Everyone has reusable stuff now.  It's called the web.  Everyone can even inventory their reusable stuff in various ways (iTunes, LibraryThing etc.)  Community is the purview of online aggregators of people, which have replaced in some (many?) ways the offline aggregation that used to take place in physical spaces.  The library website/OPAC is most definitely not a leading online community destination.

So what's left?
What's left is access.

Do that.