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“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).

• Findings summarizing the needs of both researchers and cultural heritage institutions.
• Findings summarizing finding aid data quality, represented within current aggregations.
• A report comprising a "blueprint" for building and launching the network in subsequent phases, including the following topics:
  • Prototype systems and demonstrations of potential functional aspects of the network.
  • Summaries of assessments of existing finding aid indexing/display systems and repository registry systems.
  Documented requirements
  • Requirements, timeline, and plan to establish a minimum viable instantiation of the network, to implement beyond the 2020-
  2022
  • 2023 research
  and demonstration
  • phase.
    
  • Proposed initial business, governance, and organizational models, to implement beyond the 2020-2023 research
  and demonstration
  • phase.
• Identified Identifying a network convener/organizational home (or homes), to coordinate activities beyond the 2020-2023 research and demonstration phase.
  
• Formal agreements/commitments from aggregators to support activities beyond the 2020-2023 research and demonstration phase.
  

See Project Reports and Resources for updates on project outputs.