Building a National Finding Aid Network | OCLC JavaScript is currently not supported or is disabled by this browser. Some features of this site will not be available. Please enable JavaScript for full functionality. OCLC.org OCLC.org Home Support & Training Community Center Developer Network WebJunction  COVID-19 | Information and resources to help Skip to page content. Research Areas Partnership People News & Events Publications Presentations About Settings Menu Search Research Research Areas User Research Building a National Finding Aid Network Building a National Finding Aid Network OCLC Research is collaborating on the California Digital Library-led, IMLS-funded project NAFAN to build the foundations for a national finding aid discovery infrastructure in the United States. OCLC will be leading research efforts with cultural heritage institutions that steward archival collections and the researchers who use those to inform project outcomes. 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. OCLC Project Lead Chela Scott Weber OCLC Team Members Lynn Silipigni Connaway Lesley Langa Chris Cyr Brittany Bannon Janet Mason Merrilee Proffitt Bruce Washburn Full Project Team Full Grant Project Team List Outputs Presentations Who Searches Archives Online? Results From a User Survey from 12 State and Regional Archival Finding Aid Aggregators (NAFAN) By Lesley A. Langa, PhD  and Chris Cyr, PhD  Presented at the SAA Research Forum 2021, July 21, 2021 Langa and Cyr provide an overview of the NAFAN pop-up survey users. Observing changes in EAD Tag Usage to Support Discovery, 2013-2021 By Bruce Washburn and Merrilee Proffitt Presented at the SAA Research Forum 2021, July 28, 2021 Washburn and Proffitt describe the comparative analysis of EAD tags and next steps for analysis of finding aids for the Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN) project. Blog Posts How well does EAD tag usage support finding aid discovery? 28 July 2021 By Bruce Washburn Washburn describes a comparative analysis of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) tags from two studies that inform the Building a National Finding Aid Network project. OCLC Research and the National Finding Aid Network project Blog post | 10 November 2020 By Merrilee Proffitt Proffitt shares details about our involvement in the Building a National Finding Aid Network project, which has received funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Posted on the Hanging Together Blog.     Follow OCLC Research:   © 2021 OCLC Domestic and international trademarks and/or service marks of OCLC, Inc. and its affiliates This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. See OCLC's cookie notice to learn more. Privacy statement Accessibility statement ISO 27001 Certificate