A talk delivered by Andrew Green at the Anybook Oxford Libraries Conference 2015 - Adapting for the Future: Developing Our Professions and Services, 21st July 2015. In the research library of the future the provision of services, many of them new, will eclipse the traditional care of collections -- or at least the care of what is termed 'common collections'. 'Distinctive collections', though, will increase in prominence, and become the basis for new activity. Research libraries, and especially these distinctive collections, will increasingly look beyond the home institution, and beyond academia, for their future uses.