Building Alliances and Allies: Advocating for Art Methodologies in Digital Collections Collaborations

Abstract

This presentation addresses the art of advocating for disciplinary methodologies in collaborations with digital collections and special collections. While art librarians speak from a well-articulated methodological position based on the long history of their profession, digital collection librarians in academic librarians often rely on digital standards, discovery platforms, or institutional practices designed for generalist collections. This disciplinary disconnect can result in collaborations and digital projects that fail to meet the needs of the art community because they do not include the necessary information used by art researchers and, thus, thwart discoverability. Two recent collaborations between the art librarian and the digital collections librarian at Miami University serve as examples of successful communication: the creation of more robust art historical metadata for the Victorian Trading Card Digital Collection, comprising 1,600 chromolithographic advertisement cards from the late nineteenth century housed at the Walter Havighurst Special Collections and the implementation of a dual-purpose zine archive, which includes a finding aid, a preservation collection located in Special Collections, and a teaching collection for instructional use housed at the Wertz Art and Architecture Library.