Building a National Finding Aid Network
"Building a National Finding Aid Network" (NAFAN) is a research project (2020-2023) rooted in the goal of providing inclusive, comprehensive, and persistent access to descriptions of archival collections or "finding aids." We believe we can more sustainably manage and provide access to these materials by developing a large-scale, national finding aid network that is community-driven, -sustained, and -governed.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, through grant LG-246349-OLS-20. The IMLS is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. To learn more, visit www.imls.gov.
Project Reports and Resources
Building a National Finding Aid Network: Final Report
This report is a key deliverable from the NAFAN research project, outlining a plan for building and launching a comprehensive national finding aid network over a 4-5 year horizon that is community-driven, -sustained, and -governed.
OCLC published five reports in May 2023 comprising the complete set of research findings from the project, summarizing the results of an investigation of both end user and contributor needs in relation to finding aid aggregations, and an evaluation of the quality and consistency of existing EAD encoded finding aid data from regional archival aggregators.
Shift Collective “Increasing Discovery of Archives" Workshop Report
Shift Collective staged a two-day workshop in December 2021, “Increasing National Discovery of Archives,” inviting the input of people whose work is centered on community-based cultural memory projects, to inform NAFAN’S development and implementation of a national network of archival descriptions. The workshop also aimed to identify ways that NAFAN might offer services, support, and advocacy to community-based archives, or might help meet the needs of researchers to better discover and access those collections. This report summarizes input from participants who attended the workshop.
This dashboard provides a summary of EAD finding aid data, represented within US-based regional/state finding aid aggregations as of November 2020-January 2021.