Prepare Collection Analysis of Four Art Libraries as Intelligence for Collaborative Agreements Project

We worked with four New York City art museum libraries on a collection analysis of their joint bibliographic holdings. A preliminary analysis was completed as of August, and remaining work focused on evaluating the implications of the data.

• A high-level overview of this analysis was featured in the OCLC Newsletter, NextSpace (Vol. 8, February 2008).
• A formal publication of findings is also available:
  Lavoie, Brian, and Günter Waibel. An Art Resource in New York: The Collective Collection of the NYARC Art Museum Libraries. (.pdf: 136K/18 pp.) .
• This project was also discussed at the Managing the Collective Collection Session at the " ARLIS/NA at Altitude" event on May 4, 2008 in Denver.

Under the auspices of a planning grant sponsored by The Mellon Foundation, the Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Art Reference Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art have formed the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) to explore deep collaboration between their respective libraries.

RLG Programs engaged NYARC in the analysis project to supply the art museum libraries with the business intelligence they need to make informed decisions about the nature of their collaborative efforts.

The analysis determines the size of the collective NYARC collection, the extent of holdings overlap as well as uniquely held materials. The project also compiles statistics about specific types of materials the consortium held a special interest in, such as auction catalogs, exhibition catalogs and serials.

A comparison of the NYARC holdings to a set of three local research libraries (New York Public Library, New York University and Columbia University), as well as a west-coast peer institution (Getty Research Institute) provides additional context for the findings.

Some data from the NYARC collection analysis

Size & Holding Overlap

Aggregate Collection: 962,290 unique titles
Holdings Overlap: One percent of titles are held by all four libraries; 83 percent of titles are held by only one library

General Characteristics

Exhibition Catalogs: 26 percent of the NYARC collection
Auction Catalogs: 16 percent of the NYARC collection
Collections: 12 percent of the NYARC collection
Serials: 2 percent of the NYARC collection

Beyond the NYARC

39 percent of the NYARC collection are unique to OCLC WorldCat
64 percent of the NYARC collection are unique compared to New York Public Library, New York University and Columbia University