Driven by new information technologies, innovative ways of acquiring, cataloging and servicing collections, and dramatic changes in the expectations of faculty and students, academic libraries are undergoing significant changes. The Brown University Library, like its colleague institutions, is carefully examining these trends and crafting responses to them which will enable us to continue our critical educational and research mission.

The Library reflects the Universityís dual mission as research institution and liberal arts college. Our commitment remains strong to continue to develop as a major national academic research library with a significant portion of collections and staffing aimed at supporting faculty research endeavors and graduate education. The challenge for the future is to make those choices which will permit us to maintain the strength and distinction of our collections and to meet both the research and curricular needs of our current and future communities. The book continues to be central to the Library's mission, but the complexity of building collections and providing services has been intensified by the co-existence of the print, visual, and digital information worlds. Online catalogs and other technical capabilities, in particular the Internet and the World Wide Web, have broadened usersí access to information resources. Service demands have exploded as users ask for greater convenience, speed of response, increased self-service capabilities, around-the-clock availability, and delivery of information to the office desktop (plus the help to use it !). At the same time, there is a growing need for increased personal service in libraries. As students and faculty undertake individual, often highly specialized or interdisciplinary research pursuits, librarians need to make themselves available to use their subject expertise and their knowledge of complex, evolving scholarly publication and information systems to match usersí interests with the most appropriate resources and services.

While the pace and scope of change have created a number of challenges for the Brown University Library, we also see opportunities arising from these changes: new and exciting ways to fulfill our basic mission of making scholarly information available to the Universityís students, faculty, and independent scholars. Where we once cataloged and organized library materials in a manual card catalog which referred users to library shelf locations, we may now create links in an online catalog that will take users directly to digitized versions of the contents of those library materials; where we once prepared printed bibliographies, we may instead produce dynamic research materials online or assist a faculty member in designing a web page for use in her class. We must know the print resources, but we must be confident in the world of electronic information as well. In today's library, there are opportunities to serve the information needs of our community in ways which literally did not exist a decade ago. The prosperity of the Brown University Library as an institution vital to the educational mission of the University depends on our capacity to use the technology and the extraordinary expertise of our staff to contribute directly to the intellectual growth of the Brown community, as we have done for more than 200 years.

"The best way for us to answer the challenges that lie ahead is to understand what we do well, to know what we must do better, and to have a clear vision of what we want Brown to be ... We must evaluate our department, our ... programs, our allocation of resources, and begin to consolidate, reconfigure, and prepare for the future while respecting our historic mission". E. Gordon Gee, Letter from the President, Brown University, September, 1998

Over the past 18 months, the Library staff has engaged in a Strategic Planning effort in which we focused on these changes in the worlds of scholarship, publishing, and information technology, as well as the problems and opportunities facing the Library now and in the coming years. The results of this internal study were compiled into a report entitled Collecting and Connecting for the Extended Classroom: Brown University Library Enters the 21st Century. This is not a static document, but a dynamic guide for the Libraryís future whose implementation will continue to be shaped by changes in the educational environment in which we operate and by input from members of our user community and campus colleagues. To gather that input this year, the Library is involved in surveying graduate students, faculty members, and undergraduates to understand their needs and the future directions they wish the Library to take.

The Libraryís planning effort has been on a parallel track with that of the Universityís Strategic Planning process and other initiatives under the stewardship of President Gee. In Collecting and Connecting for the Extended Classroom, the Library is aligned with stated University goals, specifically: "to reaffirm and revitalize the Brown undergraduate experience" with particular attention to "the quality of our support for students;" to support graduate and research programs "in order to match our expectations as a world-class university;" and to "build a stronger spirit of community and collegiality among students, faculty, and staff".

These excerpts from Collecting and Connecting for the Extended Classroom outline the Libraryís philosophy, some guidelines for its future directions, and the starting points or priorities that the Library intends to pursue in 1999-2000. In addition to the user-centered priorities that are highlighted here, the Library will also address various aspects of its internal operations that are critical to the success of our primary mission. These internal factors range from technology development to financial systems, from staff training to organizational structures. We hope that these documents will be informative to you and that they will serve as the basis for a campus dialogue about the Libraryís future. We invite your feedback and your support for the Library's efforts to meet the challenge of changing times with an unshaken commitment to excellent collections, service, and support of scholarship.

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