Art libraries play a vital role in building, managing and sustaining collections to support art scholarship. Ensuring that these valuable collections remain available long into the future requires innovative thinking about collection development, resource sharing and stewardship. The specialized and decentralized nature of the art research collective collection suggests that multi-institutional collaboration is an important option for art libraries as they seek sustainable pathways for their collections. Findings and recommendations from the Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection (OpArt) project show that data-driven analysis, as well as the practical experiences and lessons learned from real-world partnerships, are important sources of intelligence for art libraries as they address their sustainability challenges through collaborative approaches.

The Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) is an ethical, open source, artist-driven database of artist books and publications. DAAP recently received Heritage Lottery Funding to support the Women's Art Library (WAL) to build their own archives on the platform. Through a series of workshops, tutorials and drop-ins, artists represented in the WAL generated anecdotal, ‘gossipy’ histories which act as access points to artists’ books that may be out of print, limited in availability within institutional or public archives or libraries, or shared digitally for the first time. I will draw on a selection of records – an archive of examples – from the Women's Art Library on the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing to show how the database evolves in response to artists’ needs. These gorgeous, unruly catalogue records trouble, disrupt and bend metadata for queer use.1

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.