Building a National Finding Aid Network

Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN),  is a two-year, Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded (grant number LG-246349-OLS-20) research and demonstration project (September 2020 to August 2022) with the goal of providing inclusive, comprehensive, and persistent access to descriptions of archival collections, or "finding aids." NAFAN is guided by the belief that the archival community can more sustainably manage and equitably provide access to the collections in their care by developing a large-scale, national finding aid network that is community driven, sustained, and governed.

OCLC will be working on the California Digital Library-led initiative—along with project partners at Shift Collective, University of Virginia, and the Chain Bridge Group—to build the foundation for a national archival finding aid network. Project partners will be conducting work in parallel across multiple focus areas, including:  

• Research that investigates end user and cultural heritage insitutions needs for finding aid aggregations
• Evaluating the quality of existing finding aid data
• Technical assessments of potential systems to support network functions, and formulating system requirements for a minimum viable product instantiation of the network
• Community building, sustainability planning, and governance modeling to support subsequent phases moving from a project to a program, post-2022

OCLC Research will be involved in the first two focus areas, leading qualitative research with end users and contributors of archival description, as well as a quantitative analysis of extant aggregated archival description from state and regional aggregators.

Full project website (California Digital Library)

This project is an outcome of a 2018-2019 planning initiative. OCLC was also a participant in the earlier project, which produced both findings and a subsequent action plan.