Serving on the Centennial Commission, and particularly in planning the annual conference for SLA's centennial year, I took pleasure many times over in both looking back and looking ahead. Much like the wand chooses the wizard in the Harry Potter tales, this profession chose me, and I still marvel at how fortunate I am to have been part of the information revolution for almost 40 years.
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Information is power; knowledge is empowering. I envision a future where the leadership of every organization fully understands that information professionals and librarians play a role critical to their success.

In this future, information professionals are deeply involved in formulating their organization's strategic plan. They track progress in achieving goals and are urged to provide analysis that will bring about greater efficiency and effectiveness.
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There has been much discussion in the UK recently both openly and behind closed doors about whether having an association (or, in actual fact, a plethora of associations) for information workers makes us an information profession. Certainly there seems to have been a slow but steady move away by many organisations (from banks to public libraries and all in between) from seeking out candidates specifically from what we regard as our profession when they are recruiting roles that we might consider to fit our niche.
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Information professionals need a more diverse set of skills to succeed in the 21st century. New roles are offering us more exciting jobs and projects, but we need to expand our set of skills to meet those challenges. I see peers taking on new and exciting roles in records management, knowledge management, taxonomy design or data architecture--using their information science background, adding determination and a willingness to explore new areas. Our roles will be much more diverse but also so much more interesting and valuable.
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I am writing this at an important milestone in my life as well as SLA's in that I shall be retiring from the staff of SLA at the end of June after nearly fourteen years. As an information professional as well SLA has been my association professionally as well as my employer. Occasions such as these are a time for looking forward to the future with a quick glimpse at the past. With the world economy in such a mess we all have to reassess what we are doing, why are we doing it and should we continue to do it? And by "we" I mean you and I individually, and SLA as our family. SLA has just completed its alignment project and what a prescient piece of timing that turned out to be.
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As someone who has been in both a more traditional information professional role in a corporate and academic environment and also owns her own independent information business, I've seen a lot of changes in our profession over the years.

I believe we are going in the right direction as we continue to be proactive in promoting our value to the decision makers in our organizations or to our clients, or both.
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Libraries are always under pressure it seems, but we do prevail. We will always be challenged to make our case for how we contribute to our organizations. Special libraries in particular are going to look different in the years to come. As management looks for staff and space savings, users want their information on their desktop, and more and more information is available electronically, special library physical collections will become very scarce.

Technical service staff will need to translate their skills to become document and records managers.
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As SLA enters its second century as an association, the time for reflection and visions for our collective future has arrived.

When I was asked to put this piece together, I thought it would be easy. I was wrong. I have many ideas about the future of our profession based on my experience as an information professional these past seven years, but many of my ideas are fuzzy and not fully formed. After many hours trying to distill them and trying just to make sense out of most of them for myself, I came up with a simple list of statements and questions. In the end, I had just as many questions as I did answers, which was a surprise to me.
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Stephen Abram

For the SLA Centennial, we've been asked to provide an essay on our perspective regarding where our profession has been, is and is headed--no small task.

The year 2008 has been a difficult one, with major economic disruptions, a stock market roller coaster and mortgage crises, major elections in the U.S. and Canada, commodity and energy price instability, and more. What a mess! And yet I still feel hopeful. Part of that is because, taken from the perspective of a century-old association, we've survived and thrived in these sorts of business cycles many times in the past. And I believe that at the core of these is a fundamental shift in the underpinnings of our global economy. 
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