We believe that: - We must design our work with sustainability in mind from the outset. Any community-led solution that we implement must be calibrated to the available resources (time, expertise, funding) among stakeholders, including aggregators and individual contributing institutions.
- The value of a national finding aid network must be clearly articulated and substantiated. It is important to accurately describe the problems we are trying to solve and the value that the network can provide, with qualitative and quantitative indicators to support those propositions.
- The network must support meaningful, inclusive, and low-barrier pathways to participation by cultural heritage institutions across the United States. We acknowledge that power, privilege, and control from predominantly white collecting institutions has led to the exploitation and erasure of marginalized communities in society, in our collections, and in our profession. In carrying out our work, we are mindful of countering this history by providing benefits to participation and not reproducing exploitative and extractive collecting models.
- We must base our long term plans for the network on our research findings rather than current assumptions or the status quo. The network must address a broad range of needs across distinct cultural heritage institutions and researchers. We will treat these information needs respectfully and work to design a system that equitably supports multiple user groups.
- We must utilize technologies and standards that promote open sharing and global distribution of knowledge. We will seek to employ open source solutions and provide open access to finding aid data wherever possible.
- Perfection is the enemy of the good. We will abandon it in service of focused and tangible outcomes.
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