“The report and additional materials linked below were recently published online by OCLC Research.

Title

Research Findings from the Building a National Finding Aid Network Project

Authors

Chela Scott Weber
Senior Program Officer

Itza A. Carbajal
Associate Researcher

Lesley A. Langa
Associate Research Scientist

Lynn Silipigni Connaway
Executive Director, Research

Brooke Doyle
Senior Project Coordinator

Brittany Brannon
Senior Research Specialist

Merrilee Proffitt
Senior Manager

Source

via OCLC Research, California Digital Library

DOI:10.25333/7a4c-0r03

About the Project

From 2020–2023, OCLC was a partner on Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN), an IMLS-supported research and demonstration project to build the foundation for a national archival finding aid network to address the inconsistency and inequity of the current archival discovery landscape (LG-246349-OLS-20). The project was led by the California Digital Library (CDL), with partners at OCLC, the University of Virginia Library, Shift Collective, and Chain Bridge Group.

OCLC led research for the project, undertaking an investigation of both end user and contributor needs in relation to finding aid aggregations, and an evaluation of the quality and consistency of existing EAD encoded finding aid data from regional archival aggregators.

The NAFAN findings represent an unprecedented effort in research serving the archival community. This research provides valuable insight that can be used by the NAFAN project and inform other projects serving archival researchers and archivists, those wishing to leverage archival descriptive data, and researchers of archives and archival users for exploring new paths of inquiry for their own research.

Direct to Full Text Report
36 pages. 

Direct Links to Additional Materials

• Pop-up survey
• User interviews
• Focus group interviews
• EAD analysis

Project Details
Buidling a National Finding Aid Network”