Faculty may view the context of learning to be the classroom while students may view it to be the entire campus. Information literacy skills need to be taught. Academic programs need to incorporate and structure the acquisition of these skills rather than depending upon their acquisition as an unintentional by product of an assignment. Perhaps one place to start is with each professor talking directly to each class about how resources were selected and discarded for the course. Teaching what the library has is difficult because the faculty don't always know about new acquisitions or the full scope of resources particularly for interdisciplinary work.
Improved marketing is essential on the part of the library.
This strand of conversation led to concern that Iowa is falling behind in acquisition rate from peer institutions. As the discussion of acquisition rate continued, the statement was made that perhaps it is no longer possible to develop collections at all. Multidisciplinary boundaries have disappeared and the financial pressures are too intractable. However the conversation ended with a discussion of how academic priorities should be set. No library has ever been able to collect all materials published on any topic.