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.

This article was based on a presentation that was given at the IFLA-Art Libraries Section Satellite Conference. In an effort to push toward a more multidisciplinary and holistic approach to the data generated throughout the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, staff have been investigating new ways in which to amass, organize, and use that data. Segueing from a GIS mapping initiative, one such project sought to amalgamate disparate kinds of data centering around pigment analysis. This led to a multidepartment team trialing software solutions, raising questions and identifying challenges about how the institution creates and standardizes its data, and what changes are needed as we look to the future.

This article discusses how the Women's Art Library fosters creativity through the experience of the many artistic research practices hosted since the collection was installed in Goldsmiths University of London in the Library as a Special Collection.

In recent years, the traditional use of digital collections as surrogates for the physical has shifted to a paradigm of viewing collections as data suitable for computational use and novel research methods. The burgeoning collections as data movement is gaining momentum among galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) worldwide. Strategic initiatives, experimentation, innovation, and inspirational learning are occurring as digital libraries and digital humanities progress and work to develop sustainable approaches for collections as data programs. What is the position of collections as data in an ever-changing information landscape of open access, linked data, and shared data of cultural heritage collections? What has the past decade brought to the field?

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?

What role can museums and libraries play in improving people's health and wellbeing? This is the question staff at the V&A Museum are exploring through Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST), a treatment designed for adults with early onset dementia, traditionally delivered in a clinical setting. Guided by experts from the dementia charity Resonate Arts and the NHS's Memory Service, V&A curators and librarians are discovering the great potential of the museum and its collections to improve and enrich lives.

At the request of the Middelheim Museum, artist Nico Dockx and art historian Johan Pas, from the ArchiVolt research group of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, undertook a survey of the museum's library collection. Between March 2022 and December 2023, they examined the phenomenon of artists' publications from a range of perspectives, through a series of conversations with artists, designers, publishers and collectors, a symposium, and the book A kind of a ‘Huh?’ Artists' publications: (Not) a user's manual. We discussed these and other related projects with them.

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.

The current situation in Dutch museum archives is heavily influenced by developments in the museum sector in recent decades. The privatization of Dutch museums in the 1990s and the subsequent variations in legal character among these institutions has resulted in inconsistent management structures and inexplicit legal obligations, which have slowed the development of a cohesive approach to the management of museum archives in the Netherlands. Research conducted by Roosmarijn Ubink into the current state of information and archive management in the Dutch museum sector has revealed a structural lack of resources and frameworks for the management of museums’ institutional archives. Beginning in 2022, museum archivists and information professionals in the Netherlands have come together to respond to this situation.

Critical librarianship has become embedded into the epistemological structure of the LIS profession. Those working in art libraries and the Art Libraries Journal have played no small role in this, fostering progressive discussions around issues of social injustice that orbit the library and its functions. Nevertheless, the kernel of critical theory that developed out of the Frankfurt School centred upon class and economics. Librarianship, especially art librarianship, continues to be a middle-class career requiring an expensive higher qualification to enter. This requirement indicates the contradictions operating within and around the sector. As the commodification of education continues to creep in, class and economics are urgent topics that demand to be addressed by the critical librarianship movement. Yet those who practice critical librarianship remain employees of this very system and as such, the question posed is, what, if anything, can librarians do about their role within the education system to disrupt the commodification of education? The proposal is offered that librarians and artworks have more in common than seems possible. This idea is explained by briefly introducing artwork as a monad, concluding that art and perhaps librarians reflect the society that created them but cannot change it. Nevertheless, the very existence of art reflects the possibilities of such change, and maybe this is its role.

The Iconclass browser has often been used as a standard in AI projects, but has not been used to the same extent to standardise metadata in heritage institutions. Yet with the increasing proliferation of AI, metadata standardisation is imperative. This article provides insight into the new version of the Iconclass browser and explains some common misconceptions about the tool. It makes the case for standardisation of metadata and the potential use of the Iconclass browser toward that goal.

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.

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.

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.