Now available! Research findings from Building a National Finding Aid Network

I am excited to be sharing the outcomes of a major research project in service of archives, archival discovery, and archives researchers. For the last 2.5 years, OCLC has led research work for Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN), an IMLS-supported research and demonstration project 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.  

This research will inform next steps for the NAFAN project and also offers a wealth of information on archival user behavior and needs, and the current state of archival description workflows and data. OCLC has published five reports on its findings from the NAFAN research:  

• Summary of Research—Synthesizes findings from across all research activities on the NAFAN project
• Pop-up Survey—Summarizes results from a national survey of online archive users on their search behavior, information needs, and demographic characteristics
• User Interviews—Details findings from interviews with archival aggregation end users on their information needs and information-seeking behavior 
• Focus Group Interviews—Shares outcomes from focus group discussions with archivists to examine their needs for describing collections and contributing description to an archival aggregation 
• EAD Analysis—Analyzes EAD data as raw material for building a finding aid aggregation by looking for common data structures present and probing for gaps that could impede user discovery  

Find all five reports at oc.lc/nafan-research 

The NAFAN project was a true collaboration. Within OCLC, colleagues from across the research team with expertise in quantitative and qualitative research methods, archives practice, and archival data came together to bring their skills to bear on the mixed methods research, and our communication team put in a huge effort to publish five distinct reports. A thoughtful and engaged cohort of archivists served as an advisory board for the research. The overall project was coordinated by the California Digital Library (CDL), in collaboration with OCLC, the University of Virginia Library, Shift Collective, and Chain Bridge Group, and in partnership with statewide/regional finding aid aggregators and LYRASIS (ArchivesSpace) as a technical consulting partner. And it was supported by IMLS through grant #LG-246349-OLS-20.

We’re very excited to share this research, and hope readers will find it informative and useful. We’ll be out in the world talking about the findings throughout the coming year, starting with presenting at the upcoming Society of American Archivists conference and in virtual pre-conference activities. Research Library Partnership members can attend a series of upcoming webinars on this work. We’ve been blogging about our process throughout the NAFAN research, you can read past posts here. And stay tuned for future posts as we share more about our findings and dig into some of the details we find particularly interesting.