The history of American academic libraries suggests a recurrent tension between the vision of large-scale cooperation and the reality of decentralization. Even in the print era, it was sometimes challenging to achieve community-wide goals such as ensuring the preservation of the resources valued by readers. In an increasingly electronic environment, the need for collaborative approaches to community-wide goals has become even more important. Can the fundamentally decentralized nature of decision-making, and the varying incentives faced by individual libraries, align with and advance such community-wide goals? A massive format migration from print to electronic, largely uncoordinated, is now underway for scholarly journals. Given what we know of our past, how can we organize for tomorrow?