Libraries as Infrastructurists: supporting collective innovation
I recently read Matthew Wisnioski’s piece “A Nation of Innovators” in Issues in Science and Technology and it got me thinking about innovation as a collective act versus the dominant story of the solo inventor or startup ethos. Over the past twenty-five years, the rise of the entrepreneur identity has become such a prevailing cultural theme that it’s easy to forget there used to be other ways of talking about this topic.
Matthew and I crossed paths back at Virginia Tech, so I immediately recognized this theme as a throughline in his research and teaching. I’ve been sitting with his essay over the past few weeks, and a few ideas have started to bubble up.
Nixon’s Forgotten Prize
The essay highlights how, in the 1970s, Richard Nixon tried something surprising: he announced a new Presidential Prize for Innovation. It wasn’t a Nobel knock-off. Instead, it tried to broaden the idea of innovation and weave as an American value. The prize included nuns running rehabilitation programs, an entomologist, as well as the creators of Sesame Street. That detail sparked something for me… the idea that a children’s TV show or a mental health initiative were celebrated as a national innovation alongside space engineering or biomedical breakthroughs. It pointed to a more holistic vision of what innovation could mean.
Innovation wasn’t just about gadgets, patents, or IPOs. It was framed as a mindset, perhaps even a civic identity that the federal government was trying to cultivate. Innovation was cultural. It was infrastructural. It lived in the shared space between government, universities, industries, and communities.
That vision (and the Prize) didn’t last. It fizzled in the shadow of Watergate. From there computers and the rise of Silicon Valley rose to prominence, and the story of innovation narrowed to the more digital ethos we have today. Garage tinkers, business disruptors, crypto influencers, venture capitalists, and tech billionaires have become the cultural heroes: the definition and measuring stick. In the process, we lost a narrative that once positioned innovation as collective, public, and oriented toward a more common good.
Innovation as Literacy
Another aspect that stood out to me in Wisnioski’s essay is how the Commerce Department in the 1960s treated innovation as a type of literacy. They saw it as something Americans needed to learn, like a foreign language, so the government stepped in as the “teacher” or facilitator of innovation.
The programs they launched weren’t flashy: extension-style courses in small-business management, public-private partnerships to solve sewage problems, matchmaking between universities and local companies. This wasn’t innovation as disruption. It was innovation as infrastructure. It was about making sure whole regions weren’t left behind.
Today, it seems that every university has a center for entrepreneurship, every city has an innovation district, every company markets itself as “innovative.” Today that probably translates into something like: AI-powered.
Innovation itself has become a buzzword industry. People learn repeatable formulas and methodologies, commercialization workflows, or personal branding techniques. But I wonder if we’ve lost the broader, quieter idea? The idea of innovation as infrastructure, as something civic and collective, designed to lift communities rather than chasing the myth of unicorn companies or aspirations of global scale markets.
Instead, the teaching of innovation has been reduced to pitch decks rehearsed like stage plays, incubators and accelerators that funnel ideas into narrow commercial pipelines, and hackathons that collapse complex social problems into 48-hour coding sprints. What’s missing is depth… an orientation toward the cultural, social, and infrastructural work that makes innovation meaningful in the first place.
Information Infrastructurists
When I think about libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, I see them as infrastructurists of collective innovation. We don’t just preserve collections or artifacts, we carry forward heritage, language, media, meaning, and legacy. We bring the past into the future not only with content but through context: the technologies, scaffolding, spaces, processes, and experiences that allow discovery, access, re-use, debate, and sharing.
Across the library landscape, we are cultivating literacies and raising hard questions, especially around the ethics and responsible use of AI and data. We sustain cultural memory, broker partnerships across disciplines and communities, and serve as steady anchors, partners, and curators of the public good. To borrow Wisnioski’s term, perhaps we are “bureaucratic innovators”: pragmatic and civic-minded.
But I think infrastructurists captures this sentiment more effectively. Infrastructurists think in systems. We build the connective collective tissue that lets knowledge, meaning, and ideas circulate. We design not just for the next disruption, but for the long arc of continuity. We don’t chase headlines or valuations; we shape the environments, standards, and practices that innovation and information desperately depends on. To be an infrastructurist is to play the long game and to seek lasting impact.
Why This Narrative Matters
It’s fascinating that Nixon’s administration celebrated Sesame Street as a national innovation. Fast forward several decades, and today’s leaders have cut its funding and questioned the value of the very program that was once honored as a breakthrough… and that has been shared across generations. Yes, politics have shifted, but so has our definition of innovation.
When we lose the collective frame, we narrow our sense of possibility. We overlook (and perhaps ignore) the acts of innovation that don’t fit in current model. We don’t pay as much attention to the things that exist outside the current meta-narrative. And with that, we lose the critical components:the cultural, social, educational, infrastructural, and stewardship layers. And that’s dangerous, because those are the very aspects that knit communities together. They also hold the greatest potential for ensuring equitable access to information, enhancing quality of life and a sense of belonging + participation + agency, and perhaps even easing some of the polarization that defines our current national moment.
Most library leaders know that our work isn’t just about providing access to collections, spaces, or technologies. In small yet visible ways, we aim to shape and influence the culture of our communities. Innovation in librarianship, then, is not about disruption for its own sake. It’s about building trust, fostering connection, and creating the cultural conditions where people can learn, imagine, and thrive together.
Seen through a systems lens, this is the work of infrastructurists. Libraries operating more like information ecosystems than knowledge-lending factories: we manage relationships, flows, and feedback loops. Our value isn’t measured in transactional stats, social media likes, or the novelty of trendy services, but in how well we nurture resilience, build bridges, support, equity, and nurture adaptability over time.
Innovation, in this sense, is organic… sustaining the soil of cultural memory, circulating the nutrients of knowledge, and tending to the spaces and practices where new growth can emerge.
