[Purpose/significance] Facing the contradictory of the demand and resources of exhibition services in academic libraries in China, this paper would like to better understand the reasons, methods and sustainable development strategies of their interlibrary collaboration, and to summarize and overlook their practice as a reference for other libraries.[Method/process] This paper conducted a survey on librarians who were responsible for exhibition services from 10 library members of the Exhibition Union of Academic Libraries in Shanghai, analyzed the data collected through the survey, and referred to related literatures.[Result/conclusion] Academic libraries collaborate with each other, because they share the same objectives, lack exhibition resources and each library has their advantages and characteristics. They collaborate each other by sharing exhibition information, exchanging exhibition resources, negotiating with outside partners as a team and making exhibitions together. In the future, they can further develop their collaboration by means of widening and deepening exhibition subjects, making good use of resources and experiences from outside cultural agencies, training exhibition staff together, tracing and evaluating exhibition effect by scientific methods.