The Digital Cicognara Library is an international initiative to recreate in digital form the private book collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834). His collection of five thousand early imprints comprises foundational literature of art and archaeology, and includes a diverse range of publications in all areas of the visual arts. Our partnership's 21st- century effort advances Cicognara's Enlightenment-era ideals by making digital copies of his library available through an open access web application, where they will be fully searchable from a centralized database as well as relevant subject research interfaces. The aggregated images and text offer a potentially transformative opportunity for the discipline of art history and allied disciplines. By offering a new interface for Cicognara's collection, the endeavour allows open access availability to nearly all of the key historical volumes, the illustrations within, and the searchable metadata. The Digital Cicognara Library offers a corpus that will allow scholars to ask and answer new questions in disciplines beyond art history and archaeology, and will offer scholars of early printed books a new access point to study both the individual volumes and their relationship to each other in an accessible digital collection.

In 2017 the National Gallery of Ireland was awarded funding from the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (DCHG) for the development of an online resource, focusing on its Irish art research collections. Entitled Source – Uncovering Stories of Art in Ireland, this multi-annual project aims to catalogue and digitise the collections in the ESB CSIA and ensure that these valuable collections relating to Ireland's artistic history and memory are preserved and can be easily accessed by researchers. Now in its penultimate year, Source will be launched in 2021.

Through a close examination of the UC San Diego Visual Arts and Architecture Digital Collections, this article reviews the context of the UC San Diego Library's Digital Collection including the tools leveraged to create a successful digital library environment and the importance of cultivating relationships with content donors, including challenges and opportunities. Marketing and publicity of digital collections as part of the project lifecycle will also be discussed, as well as the importance of advocating for arts content within the library's digital collection.

This article details the process involved in making the collections of the University of Stirling Archives and Art Collection available online. Our new online catalogue http://collections.stir.ac.uk allows researchers to search across our CALM for archives catalogue and our Art Collection Adlib catalogue to uncover the depth and breadth of the cultural collections on offer at the University of Stirling.

Advocating for art disciplinary methodologies in collaborations with digital collections librarians, especially in academic libraries, is a vital skill. While art librarians have refined and transformed their relationship to art disciplines in practice and through professional organizations like ARLIS, communicating the importance of art methodologies to their generalist colleagues in digital collections can be challenging. 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. However, successful collaborations are possible with compromise and negotiation. The Shields Trade Card Collection, housed at Walter Havighurst Special Collections and University Archives at Miami University, serves as a case study, demonstrating both the need for art librarians to advocate for art specific methodologies throughout the lifecycle of a digital collections project while identifying specific areas of compromise key to sustaining future collaborations.

Digital technologies are affecting all aspects of modern life, with both art and libraries becoming more digital. This presents new opportunities for engagement, but also creates significant challenges to the long term future of our collections, due to the rapid changes in technology and the threat of digital obsolescence.

This article will reflect on the ongoing work at the University of the Arts London (UAL) to preserve and provide access to the university's growing digital collections. Digital preservation is an emerging area of practice. What progress have we made so far and what does the future hold for our digital collections?