Improving Constituent Service

The Smithsonian Libraries is launching an ambitious $20 million campaign to fund critical enhancements that will serve the needs of a rapidly growing constituency. Our goal, which has the full support of the Smithsonian Institution, is fivefold:

• to enlarge, care for, and preserve the library collections entrusted to the Smithsonian Institution on behalf of the nation
• to convert the most
  important, illustrative, and useful collections to digital form in order to share them with the American people
• to ensure that the collections are easily accessible to growing numbers of users, among them Smithsonian curators and scientists, collectors, historians, businesses, teachers, and students from across the country and around the world
• to attract and retain the most expert staff and to give interns, students, and new professionals the technoological and operational skills required in today's transformed library
• to bring students, researchers and scholars from across the country to the national collections for productive research and learning experiences
  

During the campaign, the Libraries seeks support for three initiatives that build on our traditional areas of excellence and that will enable us to make our collections and services more widely available to the American people and abroad. Each initiative can be carried out with funding support for people, as well as for things.

next: Enhancing Collections