Twenty-first Century Academic Media Center: Killer App or Chindogu?

What is the role of the academic media center in the twenty-first-century research library? Will it be relevant or irrelevant? In this article the author attempts to answer these questions by first abstracting and summarizing recent reports from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Both reports offer guidance on how tomorrow's research library can be best prepared to meet future challenges and opportunities. The author then uses themes generated from this review, along with his own experiences as a media librarian and archivist, to frame a discussion of how academic media centers around the nation are already actively engaged in imagining and transforming their institutions into the research library's twenty-first century killer app. He ends by suggesting that research libraries look to media centers as models of how to be adaptive and innovative for twenty-first century academic environment.