I've been referring to libraries as "infrastructure" for years without being consciously aware of the work of Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera. I guess it's time to remedy that.
What does it mean to be epistemic infrastructure rather than an information warehouse? The warehouse metaphor, which was easy to count in gate entries and items circulated, treats knowledge as something that exists prior to the library and gets stored there. The infrastructure metaphor treats the library as part of what makes certain kinds of knowing possible at all, not a convenience for accessing knowledge that would exist regardless, but a condition for the scholarly practices through which knowledge gets produced, validated, and preserved.