Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection
Art libraries play a vital role in supporting art scholarship, but COVID-19 pandemic impacts have strained budgets to make sustainability challenges more acute than ever. To respond to these challenges and build institutional sustainability, art libraries can look to innovative partnerships and collaborations as one way forward. Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection (OpArt) is an OCLC Research project exploring opportunities for collaboration between art, academic, and independent research libraries. This project aims to help art libraries identify opportunities for beneficial partnerships around their collections, build effective collaborative structures to support these partnerships, and navigate the practical challenges involved in making collaborations sustainable and successful.
About
The work of the project brings together quantitative and qualitative analyses to consider opportunities and models for collaboration. The project team used collective collections and resource sharing activity analyses to explore the potential value art research libraries can bring to and might draw from a collaboration. Since prospective valuable partnerships can only become reality through the hard work of building and maintaining a collaboration, the project also offers lessons learned and recommendations drawn from a set of case studies of partnerships involving art libraires. The case studies share the experiences of participants involved in originating, building, and sustaining the partnerships. .
Responding to Community Need
The concept for this project originated in a discussion between Research Library Partnership (RLP) members and OCLC Research at the 2019 Art Libraries Society of North America Conference, focusing on an acute lack of space at art research libraries, difficulties in arranging for offsite storage of art research print collections, a lack of knowledge regarding the library collections of peer institutions, and the perceived value of art libraries partnering with other types of libraries on the shared management of print collections.
OpArt engaged Research Library Partnership (RLP) Partners as key stakeholders in our research. Art libraries are an important part of the RLP, and the staff’s experiences at these institutions guided our investigation and informed our case studies work. Throughout the project, OCLC Research consulted an advisory committee comprised of RLP member institutions. The project advisors helped to frame the collective collections and resource sharing analyses, identify case study partners, interpret the findings, and finalize the recommendations.
Outputs
Publications
Specialized and Decentralized: Stewardship of the Art Research Collective Collection
7 November 2024
Chela Scott Weber, Mercy Procaccini, Dennis Massie, Brian Lavoie
Shares findings and recommendations from the Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection project to provide art libraries with important resources as they seek to address their sustainability challenges through collaborative approaches.
Sustaining Art Research Collections: Case Studies in Collaboration
18 April 2023
Dennis Massie, Chela Scott Weber, Mercy Procaccini, Brian Lavoie
This report shares recommendations for building successful collaborations and identifies typical challenges library partnerships navigate based on case study research of current art library collaborations.
Sustaining Art Research Collections: Using Data to Explore Collaboration
15 February 2023
Brian Lavoie, Dennis Massie, Chela Scott Weber
This report explores collaboration opportunities between art, academic, and independent research libraries by analyzing WorldCat bibliographic and holdings data and WorldShare interlibrary loan transaction data.
Video
Presentations
Sustaining art research collections—Identifying and building strong library collaborations
Virtual
Learn about OCLC Research findings that support identifying, building, and sustaining partnership opportunities.
Collaboration for sustainability: Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection
virtual
Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection (OpArt) is an OCLC Research project exploring opportunities for collaboration between art, academic, and independent research libraries. This presentation reports on the project’s first two phases: an art research collective collection analysis using WorldCat data, and an analysis of interlibrary loan (ILL) sharing patterns using five years of WorldShare Interlibrary Loan data.
Topics: Collective Collections
OCLC Research Library Partnership Roundtable: Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection progress report
This year’s edition of the OCLC RLP Roundtable at ARLIS’s 50th Annual Conference featured an update on the OCLC Research project Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection (OpArt).
Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection: progress report
In this webinar, OCLC Research staff present a progress report at the midway point of the two-year Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection project.
Topics: Collective Collections
Sponsor
Quick Links
Short URL: oc.lc/art-collective-collection
Acknowledgments
This project is supported through a grant by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation with significant co-investment from OCLC. We are grateful for the advice and perspective of our Advisory Committee:
- Jon Evans, Chief of Libraries and Archives, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Rebecca Friedman, Assistant Librarian, Marquand Library, Princeton University
- Roger Lawson, Executive Librarian, National Gallery of Art
- Autumn Mather, Director, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago
- Lori Salmon, Head, Institute of Fine Arts Library, New York University
- Keli Rylance, Head Librarian, Richardson Memorial Library, Saint Louis Art Museum
- Kathleen Salomon, Chief Librarian, Associate Director, Getty Research Institute
- Tony White, University Librarian, OCAD University
Support Materials
An Art Resource in New York: The Collective Collection of the NYARC Art Museum Libraries.
By Brian Lavoie and Günter Waibel
2008