The Information Institute of Syracuse at Syracuse University is engaged in a project designed to build collaborative digital museum and digital library reference services. To that end, the project team is currently developing, testing, and evaluating procedures and mechanisms that will enable museums and libraries to work together in providing reference assistance over the Web to support patrons' image information needs. The user-centered project is based upon a successful model for digital reference that has been widely embraced in the digital library community. This approach is expected to yield new insight into users' image seeking behavior that will help museums and libraries provide transparent access to visual resources across collections and institutions. This article presents an overview of the project and discusses the challenges involved in helping users find appropriate images on the web.