NAFAN focus groups: Aligning participant selection with project values

This post is one in a series detailing the research work OCLC is contributing to the Building a National Finding Aid Project (NAFAN). You can see the rest of the series here.

Focus group background

As part of our NAFAN research activities, OCLC Research conducted focus group interviews with archival practitioners. The focus groups were designed to address the following research questions:

  • What are the enabling and constraining factors that influence whether organizations describe the archival collections in their care?
  • What are the enabling or constraining factors that influence whether organizations contribute to an aggregation of archival description?
  • What value does participation in an archival aggregation service bring to organizations?

Alignment with project values

Early in the project, the NAFAN team defined core values and principles to guide our work. When developing our approach to the focus groups, we were especially careful to keep this value in mind:

The network must support meaningful, inclusive, and low-barrier pathways to participation by cultural heritage institutions across the United States.

To center this value, we wanted to include archival practitioners from a wide variety of institution types and sizes. We knew we needed to hear from a range of voices to best understand what inclusive and low-barrier pathways to participation might look like. We also wanted to include people from a variety of roles and responsibilities within archives, as we knew that positionality within an organization would likely influence how they understood and responded to our questions.

We put out a call for participation and tried to distribute it broadly, posting it on national and regional archival organization email lists, sharing it through our regional aggregation partners and their networks, promoting it on Twitter, and doing direct outreach to individuals and organizations who might not otherwise see it via the networks of the NAFAN team.

The call for participation directed potential interviewees to a screener questionnaire, in which we asked for information to help us select the varied group we wanted to interview. We needed to keep the questionnaire short, to keep from losing people to a burdensome process, so the information we prioritized for the screener included:

  • Institutional Information: state where institution is located, number of employees dedicated to archival work, type of archive
  • Details of aggregation participation: whether they work for an institution that currently participates in an archival aggregation, and if so, which aggregator/s
  • Information about the archivist & their job: current job title, current major responsibilities, number of years in that position, number of years in the field

We had 229 people volunteer to participate in the focus group interviews via this questionnaire. If you were one of them – thank you!

Selection logic and process

From this group, we needed to identify whom to invite to participate in the interviews. We planned to do 10 interviews, with 5-6 people in each group.

We knew that creating groups of people in similar situations often helps in the flow and ease of focus group interview conversations, so we designed our groups to bring together people in comparable roles or organizations. A key factor that we wanted to keep in separate focus groups was aggregation participation, so we created two of each group type – one with current aggregation participants and one with individuals whose institution does not contribute to an aggregation. The five group types we created were:

  • Very Small Institutions / Lone Arrangers: this group included participants who worked in settings with fewer than four positions devoted to archives. The individuals in this group necessarily had a broad set of responsibilities given the size of their shop.
  • Leadership / Administrative: this group included participants who held leadership positions at the department or repository level, such as head of special collections or director of archives types of roles, and likely had budgetary and decision-making responsibility.
  • Public Services & Tech Services, small institution: these were participants who worked in settings with between 4-7 positions devoted to archives, and had responsibilities in reference, teaching, and outreach or arrangement and description, or both.
  • Public Services & Tech Services, large institution: these were participants who worked in settings with 8 or more positions devoted to archives, and had responsibilities in reference, teaching, and outreach or arrangement and description, or both.
  • Technical Services & Systems Responsibilities: these were participants whose primary responsibilities included authority over a collection management system like ArchiveSpace, or discovery and/or other systems, along with responsibilities related to arrangement and description.

Using the data from the questionnaire, we filtered volunteers into these groupings. Across each group, we tried to select individuals whose time in the field, time in their current positions, and archive types were different from one another, and who represented different regions of the US.

Outcomes

After inviting participants according to our group structure, we conducted 10 focus group interviews throughout June of 2021. We had 52 participants total, 24 of whom worked in a setting participating in aggregation, and 28 of whom did not.

The participants represented 27 states and the District of Columbia. In terms of regional representation, we included participants from all of the US Census Regions and Divisions: 11 from the West, 8 from the Midwest, 13 from the Northeast, and 20 from the South. Figure 1, below, provides a further breakdown by regional divisions.

US Map showing the breakdown of focus group participation by US Census Region and Division
Figure 1: Focus Group Participation by US Census Region and Division

Participants also represented a wide variety of types of archives, a break down by self-reported type is shown in the figure below. The archive type with the highest representation in the focus groups was academic archive, with 22 participants. Using the Carnegie Classifications of Institutes of Higher Education to further analyze participants’ academic institution, we see additional variation across this category. Two participants worked at archives in Baccalaureate Colleges (one Arts & Sciences Focus, one Diverse Fields), five in Master’s Colleges & Universities (two M1, three M2), and fifteen from Doctoral Universities (ten R1, four R2, one D/PU). Similarly, the museum library and archive type with 11 participants included those from large and small art, history, and other types of museums.

Academic archive 22
Museum library / archive11
Government archive6
Community archive4
Public library archive4
Historical society archive3
Independent research library 2
International organization1
Performing arts archive1
Regional archive1
Figure 2: Participant break down by institution type (self-reported)

We are pleased with the array of perspectives we were able to include through our recruitment and selection efforts. The resulting focus group conversations were rich and varied, bringing forward both differences and commonalities across participant roles and institutional types and sizes. We are in the process of analyzing the data from these interviews and will share more about our findings on Hanging Together during the next few months.