Barbara Quint provides in Searcher an excellent crystal-ball view of what the world of academic and research libraries might look like in a not-too-distant future, a world in which the print business model has finally been vanquished by the intellects who both create and consume the content that has powered academic and professional journals. In this happy world the swords of subscription dollars have been beaten into the plowshares of technology that allow peers to share content freely via open source publishing and affordable storage and search capabilities their sponsoring institutions reap the benefits of their investments. Barbara's vision includes a day when Google has learned how to play well with "invisible" protected academic content and provide ecommerce access to it, as well as a time when the skills of information professionals are steered towards enabling users to make the most of this brave new world. Could it happen? None of this is a stretch, because it's really what's happening today before our eyes - except, perhaps, the Google part. But although many existing roles of publishers may fade in a cloud of paper dust in this environment, it's likely that the need for people to publish independently of their employing institutions via publishing entities will continue to prevail, regardless of how much those institutions want to retain their employees' intellectual property rights. The most successful institutions will be those that mangage to balance their claims to employees' intellectual property with the the ability of that property to establish itself in an open market with open technology.