This special issue of "portal: Libraries and the Academy" grew out of a discussion about the need for speculative, creative space within the library and information science (LIS) literature.1 While venues for exposing important research and illuminating case studies are plentiful, the LIS literature lacks an obvious platform on which to speculate--to "imagine the future." This issue is an attempt to create such a space. To accomplish this task, several leaders from different sectors of the academic library ecosystem were asked to imagine the future at some critical inflection point. Based on their knowledge of current trends and emerging realities, the authors were asked to project a future for an aspect of this ecosystem they find particularly important or impactful. To challenge their thinking, they were prompted with several future-oriented questions, which included: (1) How will we define the academic library in the future? (2) What will a globally networked library look like? (3) How will we use information differently? (4) Where will the library begin and end relative to academic computing and other campus and network services that will be available to faculty and students? (5) How will higher education evolve and how will the academic library align with that change? (6) How will scholarship and its products evolve? (7) How will we define collections? and (8) Will current large-scale collaborative efforts create the efficiencies and infrastructures they promise? This special issue is the product of the authors' collective response to this challenge, in which they explore the possibilities of what academic libraries might become or cease to be.