“Building a National Finding Aid Network” addresses a fundamental challenge faced by researchers of all types: the significant barriers to locating relevant archival materials across the vast, distributed, and unevenly supported field of cultural heritage institutions. Digital aggregations of finding aids (descriptions of archival collections) are often siloed and at-risk as their infrastructure ages and budgets dwindle, and many institutions’ finding aids are not available or easily discoverable online. As a result, much of the stewarded archival content in the United States is essentially invisible, and the voices documented therein are poorly represented in the historical record. This 2.5-year research and demonstration project (September 2020 to February 2023) is rooted in the goal of providing inclusive, comprehensive, and persistent access to finding aids by laying the foundation for a national finding aid network available to all contributors and researchers. The California Digital Library (CDL) is coordinating the project, in collaboration with Chain Bridge Group, OCLC, Shift Collective, and the University of Virginia Library (UVA), and in close partnership with statewide/regional finding aid aggregators and LYRASIS (ArchivesSpace). | 
