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Since many ARLIS/NA expressed interest in the responses to
my question posted to the list back in June, below is a summary.
Art Library Collaborations
with other institutions (museums, libraries, academic institutions)
Compiled from responses on
the ARLIS/NA-Listserve July-September 2009.
Library & Museum
1.
In
the last couple of years, the University Libraries at Wichita State U.
have incorporated the catalog of the Wichita Art Museum Library in the
online catalog. We don’t house the materials, but make referrals and this
allows the WAM library collection to be accessible online.
2.
The
Worcester Art Museum has a collaborative arrangement with the Libraries
of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. We entered into a
formal partnership in 2001 and the Art Museum Library serves as the adjunct
Fine Arts Library for Holy Cross. Our shared cataloging system is housed
on their server (they are located physically across the city from us) and
we can log on to their databases as a satellite site.
3.
The
Cincinnati Art Museum has recently entered into a collaboration with an academic
library in Cincinnati and their collaboration is modeled loosely after
Worcester Arts Museum & Holy Cross.
4.
Wayne State university (either library system and/or library school) we have
had (and are continuing to have) formal partnerships with the Detroit
Institute of Arts Research Library & Archives, the Detroit Symphony
Orchestra Library & Archives, the Michigan Opera Theatre Library
& Archives, the Museum of African American History, and Motown
Museum, to name a few.
5.
The
New York Art Resources Consortium is in talks with Columbia and NYU
looking for collaborative opportunities between our
institutions. RLG/OCLC Programs has been facilitating our discussion and
that will be out for general distribution shortly (within the next few weeks)
outlining areas where we could work together. Right now, the Met
and MoMA have work study arrangements with Columbia, but we are
looking to expand that program and delve into areas there is a report of
expedited resource sharing, collection development, etc.
6.
Libraries of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ontario College of Art and Design
(university) next door, are just finishing the first (test) year of an
affiliation agreement, and we hope to both continue and extend the terms of the
agreement. Jill Patrick and I launched this together on the basis of
close physical proximity of buildings and complementary collections.
7. I know that Colonial
Williamsburg’s Rockefeller Library and the College of William and Mary
have a partnership that allows them to share the same -Sirsi ILS – this is in
fact a multi-institution partnership: http://swem.wm.edu/lion/ I don’t think this shared access extends to site-licensed
databases.
8.
Our
relationship is between the Toledo Museum of Art and the University
of Toledo (not just their library). Beginning in 1921, art classes
and art history classes for the university were taught by museum personnel,
with credit granted by the university. From that time forward, we have
served as the art library for the university, as well as for the museum staff
and the general public. The university library has art books, but many of them
are the result of standing orders with publishers and gifts from alumni.
Lately, as they have been downsizing, they have offered us some books, rather
than just throw them out. When we were moving toward automating the
library, we investigated the possibility of piggy-backing on the university's
system and maybe having a joint catalogue. We chose an independent ILS
and have been happy with that. In the mid 1980s, the university was
looking at accreditation [I think] and decided that the instructors should be
university staff. They went through the various processes to get onto the
university payroll. Then, in the early 1990s, the university and the
museum joined forces to raise money for a new art building and to renovate some
museum galleries. The result was the Frank Gehry-designed University of Toledo
Center for the Visual Arts, which is physically attached to the Toledo Museum
of Art (a privately endowed museum). The library moved into that building, but
remains the property of the museum and is not administered in any way by the
university.
9.
Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art History Dept at Case Western Reserve
University has had a joint program for about 30 years. All of CWRU's
art history classes are taught at the museum and the CMA library is the primary
research library for the graduate art history students.
10. Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has 'close ties with
a number of universities'.
11. The University
of Louisville and the Speed Museum have always had an informal
understanding (the curators have borrowing privileges for example) but recently
it became formalized. Briefly, the Speed Museum is expanding and its
library is out of room. So we agreed that the Speed would keep a small
library for the curators of about 1000 or so books and depend on the UofL art
library for the rest. We will pick up some of their more specialized
journal titles, catalog the books they keep and have them display in our
catalog with a Speed location and process the books they get in the
future. In return, we can accession whatever books we want from their
collection and sell the rest.
12. UCSD Libraries and the Museum
of Contemporary Art, San Diego have formed an innovative new
partnership that will expand student and faculty access to more than 8,000
visual art catalogues and related materials, and provide MCASD curatorial staff
with access to the vast holdings of the UC San Diego Libraries, the largest
academic library system south of Los Angeles. The MCASD–UC San Diego Libraries
partnership is mutually beneficial for both institutions, given the close proximity
of the two La Jolla institutions, as well as their common intellectual and
scholarly interests. The transfer of art materials to UC San Diego will
integrate access to these catalogues and other materials with all the
resources—more than 7 million print and electronic items—of the UC San Diego
Libraries. We continue to receive new materials for ingest into the UCSD Arts
Library collection.
13.
Cultural District Library Consortium (Fort
Worth, Texas) http://libweb.lib.tcu.edu/F?func=file&file_name=find-b&local_base=mus01pub) They were formed in 1996 by the libraries of the
Amon Carter
Museum, Kimbell Art
Museum, and Modern Art
Museum of Fort Worth. CDLC's newest member, the National
Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, joined the consortium in 2003. The CDLC
catalog is achieved through a partnership with the library at Texas Christian University.
Library & Library
1.
When
I worked at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, we established a
partnership with the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering &
Technology. Linda Hall is a privately funded special library that acts as
the University of Missouri, Kansas City campus' science library. The
partnership was primarily developed to share an online catalog, aptly named
'Leonardo.' Though they were science and we were art, we both functioned as
academic libraries: acquired, cataloged and made accessible appropriate
collection materials of a research nature, provided reference services, were
open to the public, participated in interlibrary loan activities, and initiated
special programs for the community. Since Linda Hall is its own entity, they
have numerous public exhibitions, programs and events for the KC
community. (http://www.lindahall.org/). Aside from the simple sharing of
an online system, both institutions agreed to raise approx. $1 million for an
endowment so that when it came time to change, upgrade the online system we
wouldn't have to 'beg' our respective administrations for significant amounts
of capital.
2.
Wichita Art Museum library has a cooperative arrangement with the University of
Wichita library.
3. Baltimore Art Research Consortium (BAROC) in the Baltimore,
Maryland area. The group was formed of librarians from a variety of art-related
institutions including: academic, museum, public, and MD state department
libraries. In 2002 it created the Maryland ArtSource as its
primary activity, which unfortunately is no longer operational. You can find
more information about the group in the attached charter document and on the
MAS website: http://www.marylandartsource.org/
I am not sure of the future of
the group.
University & Museum
1. The University of Tulsa took over the management of Gilcrease
Museum from the City of Tulsa last year.
OCLC and library community
1.
We’ve
recently facilitated discussions between the NYARC art museum libraries (Metropolitan,
MoMA, Frick, Brooklyn), and NYPL, Columbia and NYU to provide them with a
platform for figuring out how they could collaborate. These discussions got
started because the NYARC analysis (see http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/collectivecoll/mining/nyarc4.htm) had surfaced a very high level of
uniqueness in the NYARC library collections, and these findings had piqued the
interest of the other local pubic/academic libraries. We’ll issue a report
shortly about findings and recommendations coming out of these discussions. See
also the Beyond the Silos of the LAMs report (http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2008-05.pdf).
Leslie Abrams, MSLS
Head, UCSD Arts Library
Telephone: 858-534-3221
Geisel Library, 0175Q
9500 Gilman Drive
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0175
UCSD Arts Library renovation Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artslibrary/
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