3 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 294 — 2018 What Are We Trying to Build? Barbara Rockenbach, Associate University Librarian for Research and Learning, Columbia University This compilation of articles brings together ideas on the changing roles and opportunities for academic library liaisons with faculty. Five institutions share their reorganizations and redefinitions of what it means to be a liaison in today’s research library in this issue of Research Library Issues (RLI). There are many commonalities across the five approaches, as well as differences based on the different contexts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the University of California (UC), Riverside Five institutions share their reorganizations and redefinitions of what it means to be a liaison in today’s research library... the University of Guelph the University of South Florida and the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. Much has been written in recent years about the role of the library liaison.1 The value of this particular aggregation of articles is that these institutions have shared the outcomes of some of the changes made to liaison work over the last decade, in the case of Guelph, and over shorter time periods for the other institutions. The articles reflect on not only what work liaisons are doing, but how that work is done. Guelph structured their reorganization of liaison work around the question, “What are we trying to build?” This is an excellent place for all of us to start as we think about the value and future of the work liaisons do on our campuses. To begin with commonalities among the approaches contained in this issue, it is clear that values are critical to all institutions reconsidering liaison work. For the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), values are at the heart of the work they are doing. Values of openness, social justice, and diversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of the MIT approach, or as the article states, MIT Libraries “are determined