The NYARC libraries have a long history of collaborating on projects, dating back to the 1980s and the establishment of the Art Museum Library Consortium. The collaborative efforts of the Art Museum Library Consortium resulted in the retrospective conversion of the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston card catalogs into an online format.
Since NYARC was formed in 2006, the members have been involved in a number of initiatives. Past and current initiatives are listed alphabetically below. Please follow the links below to learn more.
-
Arcade: Containing almost 1 million records, Arcade unites the collections of the Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art. The creation of Arcade was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
View the Arcade press release
In 2011, records documenting over 125,000 cataloged works of art from the Frick's Photoarchive were added to Arcade, creating the first publicly accessible interface for this valuable research collection. The Photoarchive contains an estimated 1.2 million images and cataloging of the collection is ongoing.
View the Photoarchive press release
-
ARTstor Brooklyn Museum Costumes: ARTstor is collaborating with The Metropolitan Museum of Art to share approximately 5,800 images of American and European costumes and accessories from the Brooklyn Museum in the Digital Library.
-
Collection Development: The group is actively exploring shared collection development and working to identify specific areas for collaboration. Library staff regularly compare borderline acquisitions, where monograph titles that are marginally in scope for one collection are circulated to determine if another partner intends to acquire the item. The libraries are also looking more broadly at current collecting areas across the consortium to document areas of overlap. To assist in this analysis, the libraries participated in an approval plan exercise using the Harrassowitz subject profile to compare collecting areas.
Progress has been made in canceling non-essential print periodical subscriptions and consolidating runs when one member library elects to keep the title on behalf of the consortium. Deduplication analysis, ongoing review, and consolidation continues in the area of periodicals.
In early 2011, the Frick Art Referene Library and the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art completed a pilot project to address coordinated collecting of born-digital auction catalogs using ContentDM and Archive-It. The group's findings were presented at the SCIPIO Users Group Virtual Meeting held May 2011.
View the Archive-It assessment report
-
Documenting the Gilded Age: New York City Exhibitions at the Turn of the 20th Century: A joint project of the Frick Art Reference Library and Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives that digitized ephemeral exhibition checklists, pamphlets, and catalogs from historically significant galleries, society clubs, and arts associations operating from the late 19th to early 20th century. With funding from the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program, as part of its support of METRO’s Digital Metro New York initiative, the collection began in 2010 and currently includes 540 digitized works, all available through Arcade. Online exhibitions augment and highlight information in the historical documents. View the exhibitions at http://gildedage.omeka.net/ and http://gildedage2.omeka.net/.
-
JSTOR 19th Century American Art Periodicals: JSTOR's Arts & Sciences VIII Collection includes a group of rare 19th and early 20th century American Art periodicals digitized as part of a special project undertaken with the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Art Reference Library, and the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives.
-
JSTOR Auction Catalogs Beta: JSTOR is collaborating with the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Art Reference Library in a pilot project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to understand how auction catalogs can best be preserved for the long term and made most easily accessible for scholarly use.
-
Knoedler Gallery Digital Collection: The Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art digitized 898 catalogs, checklists, and unpublished materials from the Watson, NYARC, and Knoedler collections, comprising approximately 14,000 pages of content created between 1869 and 1946. Many items include extensive handwritten annotations; in several cases, more than one copy of a particular catalog was digitized to capture these unique additions.
-
Macbeth Gallery Digital Collection: The Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Art Reference Library digitized the exhibition checklists and pamphlets of the Macbeth Gallery in the fall of 2008.
-
NYC-7: Seven New York institutions - the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, Columbia University Libraries, the Frick Art Reference Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J. Watson Library, The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York Public Library and New York University Libraries - are engaged in collaboration discussions.
-
OCLC Collection Analysis: A project to analyze the collections of the NYARC members was completed in August 2008 by OCLC's RLG Programs division in order to provide the libraries with information about the NYARC collections.
-
Resource Sharing: Through a three-year grant (2009-2011) from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the NYARC partners broadened and streamlined consortial resource sharing activities. Outcomes of this grant include the purchase of three Bookeye 4 Knowledge Imaging Centers to support document delivery workflow at each library; lifting of lending and borrowing restrictions between NYC-7 partners (that is, NYARC, NYPL and the libraries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia Univerisity and NYU); and the development of a new lending policy for auction catalogs, which were previously not loaned by the Frick Art Reference Library or the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.