Questions of organizational design weigh heavily on our academic community, where incentives sometimes misalign with community-wide goals, yielding externalities. These misaligned incentives pose challenges in the digital transition that is all around us in academia today. This fundamental concern links together several issues we have been working on recently, for example, in the dissemination of scholarship; in storage and preservation of library resources; in access to undergraduate education; and elsewhere. I plan to focus briefly on a specific episode to organize shared library infrastructure in the 1950s and use this as a jumping-off point to consider organizational issues that we face, not only in the library realm but in other aspects of the digital transition for higher education as well.