17 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 294 — 2018 • the development of globally interoperable knowledge platforms • re-thinking library collections and scholarly communications • new kinds of collaboration and partnerships in support of digital scholarship • addressing grand challenges through research in scholarly communications and information science and • promoting teaching and learning that support the MIT community in both navigating as well as influencing the information ecosystem. The MIT liaison program is initiating a paradigm shift in response to both the external forces changing research, scholarship, and teaching and learning, as well as the directions set for the MIT Libraries by the Future of Libraries Task Force report. We will need to change much of what we do and how we do it. Across the MIT Libraries, the changes in one department or unit will both affect and be affected by changes happening in other units. Synchronizing with others and ensuring resources for this collective change is a core part of the paradigm shift in the liaison program. Our paradigm shift is a work-in-progress, and this paper describes our thinking so far. What Does and What Doesn’t Change Liaisons—because of their subject expertise, relationships, and institutional knowledge—play a crucial role in advancing the MIT teaching, research, and learning mission overall. Those core functions will remain, as will the central tenet of liaison work: to make information and knowledge usable. The paradigm shift in these core functions comes from a new understanding of what it is for information and knowledge to be optimally usable in a digitally networked world. Many of our current