Art libraries provide vital support to art scholarship within their own institutions and in the broader scholarly community. As art libraries face challenges from an evolving environment, repercussions from the COVID-19 pandemic, and static or diminishing resources, finding sustainable pathways forward becomes an increasing priority. An important option for art research collections in achieving long-term sustainability is collaboration.

This is the first of two reports documenting the findings from the Operationalizing the Art Research Collective Collection project.

The report uses two approaches:

1. Collective collection analysis—Examines bibliographic and holdings data describing an art research collective collection in the US and Canada to illustrate how collection analysis can inform partnership decisions.
2. Resource sharing activity analysis—Analyses data from resource sharing transactions involving art libraries to better understand these existing collection sharing partnerships and explores opportunities for other kinds of collaboration.

This first report illustrates how quantitative analysis of library collection and activity data can be leveraged by library leaders to inform decisions about collaborative opportunities supporting art research collections.