Scott has been successful in helping clients to understand the unprecedented situation of academic libraries; to engage with a paradigm shift in services and design; and to position institutional mission as the chief driver of space design. He does this by working skillfully with students, faculty, administrators, and librarians, both individually and in groups. He urges that information technologists and student services staff also be included in library planning. Scott will contribute most to the visioning phases of the project, but he can also help ensure that an institution's vision for its library is kept vital throughout the programming, schematic design, and design development phases of the project.

Scott was first invited to consult on a library project in 2004 and has since then served nearly 20 clients in the United States and abroad with projects ranging in likely cost from under $50,000 to over $100 million.

As a consultant, Scott can help to foster:

• Campus-wide deliberations about goals for new and renovated library space
• Informal, minimally scripted discussions about the library involving library staff, students, faculty, campus administrators
• Deliberations about the deployment of library staff for learning
• Discussions growing out of formal presentations
  • "The Choice for Learning" (c. 35 minutes): considers (i) what values physical library space delivers; (ii) what the experience of building academic libraries in the United States over the last decade teaches us about the choice to design libraries for learning; (iii) the chief obstacles to making the design choice for learning; and (iv) how an archetypal feature of libraries, the reference desk, might be designed for learning. Based on my essay of the same title.
  • "First Questions for Designing Higher Education Learning Spaces" (c. 40 minutes): proposes four questions that colleges and universities should ask first and persistently throughout the construction or renovation of learning spaces, with much of the discussion drawing on the National Survey of Student Engagement.
  • "Designing for Uncertainty: Three Approaches" (c. 55 minutes): uses survey data to describe the services/instructional, marketing, and mission-based approaches to designing library space.  Based on my essay of the same title.
  • "Great Places for Learning: But How Do We Know They Are?" (c. 15 minutes): invokes three specific learning behaviors important in the NSSE benchmarks for effective educational practice in commenting on common practices in the design of learning spaces.
  • "Investing in Library Space: The Institutional Perspective" (c. 30 minutes): describes current library design practice, argues the case for beginning design work with the right questions, and identifies process issues for maximizing investments in library space.
  • "The Library as a Physical Space for Learning" (c. 15 minutes): notes how information technology challenges us to rethink library space planning and invokes four specific learning behaviors important in the NSSE benchmarks for effective educational practice in asking how well existing library space responds to this challenge.
  • "Righting the Balance" (c. 50 minutes): describes the badly skewed planning methods typically used in library construction and renovation. Based on my essay of the same title.
• "Thinking out of the box" through, for instance,
  • A "reference desk" exercise that asks participants to consider if they like the relationship between readers and librarians that the reference desk creates and to identify alternative relationships they would rather have
  • A "where do/should librarians work" exercise that encourages participants to break the automatic and limiting association of librarians with the library building
  • A "let's design a bank instead" exercise meant to prompt participants to think about why we want people to come and not to come to the library as a physical space
  • A "what's wrong with this picture" exercise based on a 2005 survey of library building and renovation projects among the Big Ten universities
  • A "vignettes" exercise in which participants are asked to think about a set of brief statements made by librarians, chief academic officers, faculty members, and others about a choice of different topics, including library space, library budgets, library staff responsibilities, and information literacy