Skip to page content.

The OCLC Research Library Partnership

Connecting you to a shared future.

Cooperative innovation that makes your library more valuable, operating processes more efficient, and shapes new distinctive services.

Art and Architecture Group

Leads: Dennis Massie, Chela Scott Weber

The Art and Architecture Group is a venue for staff from OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) institutions to explore topics of interest to art and architecture librarians. Comprised of staff from art museum, academic, and independent libraries with art research collections, this group seeks to expand access to art research materials and to provide innovative support for the creation of new art scholarship.

The Art and Architecture Group is supported by OCLC RLP staff and can draw on OCLC Research data science capacity.

Members of the Art and Architecture Group and OCLC Research staff interact in a variety of ways:

  • Meetings and programs, often featuring initiatives, projects, and best practices from the Art and Architecture Group community
  • Collaborative research projects addressing the needs and interests of the Art and Architecture community, led by OCLC Research with guidance from community experts
  • A topical listserv, OCLCRLP-ART-ARCHITECTURE-L, open to staff at any RLP-affiliated institution

Current Activity

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the Art and Architecture Group and OCLC Research have teamed up to share information, explore strategies for navigating unprecedented disruption, and collectively plan both for the near term and for a post-pandemic future.

Our joint activities include:

  • Holding virtual town halls on coping with the impacts from the pandemic and planning for reopening libraries to staff and patrons
  • Organizing a pilot project to allow physical books loaned among the art museum libraries via interlibrary loan to circulate from the borrowing library
  • Broadening the scope of a planned investigation of the art research library collective collection to include a study of sustained interactions and partnerships between art libraries and other types of institutions, particularly around shared access to print collections 
  • Understanding the relationship between art, academic, and independent research libraries—through analysis of their collections and resource sharing activity—and building case studies of successful partnerships can help identify new possibilities for collaboration that support persistent availability of art libraries’ wealth of resources to researchers, wherever they are

Recent Work