Ask anyone who commissions art to name the freelancers who make a project go smoothly and they will produce three or four names without hesitation. Ask for those people’s current rate, availability and email address and the hesitation arrives immediately.
The best relationships are the least documented
Precisely because they are memorable, nobody writes them down. Documentation gets applied to the marginal cases — the maybes, the might-be-usefuls — while the genuinely important people are held entirely in memory on the grounds that forgetting them is unthinkable.
Unthinkable is not the same as impossible
You will not forget who they are. You will forget the address, the current rate, and which studio they moved to, all of which are required to actually work with them.
They are the first to become unavailable
Good freelancers get retained, go in-house, or raise their rates. Every one of those changes silently invalidates what you think you know, and you find out at the worst moment — when you need them, on a deadline, having assumed they were a constant.
A yearly check is not sentimental
A short note once a year to your top few is not networking, it is maintenance. It also produces the current facts you were missing, as a by-product of an entirely pleasant email.
Rank the ones who matter
Most rosters treat every entry as equal, which is how a critical collaborator ends up buried among four hundred maybes. Star the small group who genuinely change how a project goes, and let them surface first in every search.
Then keep their record boringly current
Rate, availability, where they are working now, what they said last time. Unglamorous fields about people you would never forget — which is exactly why nobody records them, and exactly why it hurts when it matters.