Librarians, collectors, and antiquarian booksellers have worked together for centuries towards a common goal: to preserve our cultural memory. In the world of rare books, this means understanding books as historical objects. When we care for them, we are honoring our past and, even more critically, preserving the raw materials that form our community stories. That is a large responsibility, but it is shared work among librarians, collectors, and booksellers. Yet rare books have historically had a reputation as the realm of the elite. This reputation has added obstacles to our progress, but is also increasingly false. This talk will explore why it's not only rare book librarians who can, and should be, involved in this work. Librarians' connections with their local communities are critical to collecting rare books as cultural memory, as are the contributions of individual collectors who never thought anyone else would care about what they do. We can all play a part. The more people who do, the more opportunities we have to preserve a cultural memory that more accurately reflects the richness of our communities.