One photo library, two users - what's best?

It seems like such a common need but there doesn't appear to be an obvious answer or best practice to this problem. My wife and I bought a new iMac that we hope will function as the "hub" for us. Up to this point we have been using a series of different mac laptops that belonged to either her or me (and worth clarifying, were NOT shared between the two of us). We want to consolidate those libraries on our new iMac but not under a single user profile. We strongly wish to maintain seperate user profiles on the new iMac but share and edit our photo library using Aperture (we shoot with a DSLR and other cameras).
I would think that a lot of families have a similar need and would want to share a library but the articles and threads I am reading don't have an obvious solution.
We have the opportunity to start afresh so I would like to do this right. I attempted to copy a "master" library to a shared location under the users folders but despite setting read/write access, this seemed to not quite work (images weren't resolving and Aperture would throw errors when opening).
Any advice or is there a helpful guide to setting this up that I have missed?
Thanks in advance for your time and help!

If you want to share your Aperture Library, you will have the least problems with alternatingly accessing it from different accounts, if your Aperture Library resides on a separate disk, or disk partition. A "Shared Folder" may be problematic - there have been issues with wrong access control lists and apparently unsupported video Re: Aperture cannot read newly imported video since Lion upgrade.. If you put your Aperture library on a separate disk (or partition) you should set the "Ignore Ownership on this Volume" flag for this volume, and then your wife and you should be able to read and write the Aperture  Library without problems.
Also, an Aperture library needs to be located on a local, MacOS Extended formated volume, and the performance is best, if the volume is internal, not external. Is it possible to add a second internal disk to your iMac?
I am sure you know, that Aperture is a single user application; so only one person at a time should access your Aperture library.
Good luck!
Léonie
P.S: How to set the ignore ownership flag for a disk from the "Get Info" panel:
Message was edited by: leonieDF added screen shot

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