At its inception in 2012, the Getty Research Portal shattered barriers that previously made digitized resources for art historical research challenging to locate and use without restriction. The Portal's first 10 years were marked by a period of immense growth, forging connections among collections through institutional partnerships. Flexible metadata requirements for contributing to the Portal allows large and small institutions alike to contribute a diverse range of collections but also present ongoing challenges. Work with partner institutions to identify priorities for metadata creation, cataloguing, and imaging has contributed to collection building on a global scale. Various forms of access to Portal materials have been developed alongside collection development efforts to meet new methods in art historical research. Looking to the future, the goals that were set out when the Portal was initiated continue to be the driving force behind what the Portal provides for an ever-evolving field. Ongoing work on the platform is intended to meet the shifting methodology of art historical research through the Portal's established collaborative model and open the door to new questions, new lines of inquiry, and ultimately new conclusions within art history.

The Art Discovery Group Catalogue is a virtual bibliographic resource based on the catalogues of over 70 art and museum libraries. Its future is closely linked to the question of technically and topically innovative data concepts on the one hand and to new retrieval and analysis procedures on the other. Will it be possible to interpret both the quantity and the diversity of the data in a more future-oriented and efficient way for scientific questions than traditional catalogues do?

A Parisian public library specializing in decorative arts, the Bibliothèque Forney is considered one of the first public lending art libraries in France. From the library's opening in the nineteenth century to the year 2000, readers could borrow art images to use as models or sources of inspiration. Today a selection of art plates are still freely accessible. The history of this unique service highlights the librarians’ efforts to meet the evolving needs of researchers looking for easily accessible art; their work to keep up with modernity; and their efforts to add value for their users.

Art librarians face many changes in the professional relationship with their users. Technological and cultural evolutions lead us to learn new skills to adapt ourselves to these new audiences. But are these changes really so new to librarians? Librarians have always had to embrace new technological expertise for library catalogues, databases and digital libraries. We know that librarianship is a profession where communication is primordial; communication with library users, and also with the general public – there's not much new here vis-à-vis the traditional missions of librarians. Still, librarians must become more competent than ever at conversing with patrons, to better understand their needs and their ways of expressing those needs, particularly their need to interact with our libraries and collections. Diverse examples from French art libraries illustrate how library professionals tend to use new media, technologies, and cultural trends to enable their institutions to disseminate knowledge and contribute to a more open society that can partake freely of the riches and learning history that art libraries have to offer.

Material Order is an academic consortium of material sample collections for art, architecture, and design disciplines. Founded by the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design and since comprising several more institutions in the US, it provides a community-based approach to management and open access utilizing and developing standards and best practices. Now in its twelfth year and reaching a level of maturation, Material Order offers research and pedagogical value to current and potential members and the larger design communities.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) enables the discovery of digitized content held by U.S. cultural heritage institutions by aggregating metadata contributed from participating organizations. The DPLA differs from other resource sharing networks by providing not only the locality of an item from a catalogue such as WorldCat but offers easy access to the digitized item itself. Particularly for smaller libraries, archives, and museums, including content in the DPLA makes that content much easier for users to discover, access, and contextualize than it would be otherwise. The DPLA uses what they call the Hub Model made up of Service Hubs and Content Hubs to aggregate metadata from their partners and contribute it to DPLA. This allows state and regional collaborations to onboard small institutions, adding online texts, photographs, manuscript material, artwork and more.

Based on the open-source IIIF image viewer Mirador 3, the Specialised Information Service Art, Photography, Design - arthistoricum.net, in cooperation with NFDI4Culture, the consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage, provides a platform for collaborative exploration of image resources. Within the virtual research environment, users can create their own workspaces and image collections individually or in groups, share them for collaborative efforts, and jointly create persistent annotations. This article outlines the development and integration process of this web-based research platform and highlights future areas of improvement.