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• As academic institutions look to cut their budgets, will art/architecture/visual resources libraries become merged with main libraries? Is this an opportunity?
• Digital libraries and repositories will begin taking advantage of full text searchability. Where do catalogers fit into this new view of access?
• Considering today’s tight budgets, how much metadata is enough when working with less support?
• How do you increase your visibility on campus?  What novel ways do you advocate for your library’s services?
• How have you developed grant proposals for projects in your library?  What were the challenges and what surprised you?
• How do you satisfy customers in an increasingly 24/7 instant access world?  What do you do differently?
• Going beyond statistics, how do you know that you are providing patrons with the services and resources that they want? What are some inventive and successful measures that your library has taken to determine patron satisfaction?
• Do corporate or business customer service practices such as “secret shoppers” have a place in libraries?  Have any libraries used any of these methods successfully?

• In light of the current economic climate, what strategies have you developed to provide quality resources for your community?
• How do we provide access to information and ideas that are being created in technologies that have not been traditionally supported by libraries?  How do we preserve that knowledge?
• Is this an opportunity for collaborative collection development? Why or why not will collaborative collection development take root?
• How do libraries balance fulfilling the patron’s desire for digital content with the realities of the heavily print nature of art, architecture and design publishing?

• How have you successfully created solutions using emerging technologies such as open source programs, mobile technologies, mashups and more?
• Taking advantage of new technologies, what unique projects have you successfully collaborated on with your colleagues (library, IT, etc.)?

• With reduced staffing, who should be answering questions at the reference desk? 
• What are some strategies being employed by libraries to provide reference and instruction to distance students/faculty?
• How have libraries developed instruction that integrates into the studio culture?
• How are information and visual literacy programs being successfully integrated into curricula?

• The value of visual resources libraries is being questioned in some institutions.  What are the strategies that can be employed to educate institutions and administrators about the value of such collections?  How do you promote these collections to faculty and students who prefer Flickr databases and web searching?
• Are there new paradigms for the building of and access to visual collections that we should be moving towards?

 
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Jennifer Friedman, Collections Manager and Public Services Librarian
Rotch Library of Architecture and Planning
Building 7-238, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel: (617) 258-5595    Fax: (617) 253-9331