Chela Scott Weber, Research Library Partnership, OCLC

From 2020–2023, OCLC was a partner on Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN). Led by the California Digital Library, NAFAN was an IMLS-supported research and demonstration project designed to build the foundation for a national archival finding aid network to address the inconsistency and inequity of the current archival discovery landscape. OCLC led research for the project, undertaking 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 finding aid data from regional archival aggregators. This presentation will synthesize the findings from across all OCLC’s research activities on the NAFAN grant. It will focus on how findings relate to future phases of work on the NAFAN project, including describing the significant value to be drawn from a national aggregation of archival description and the challenges that must be overcome to build the community of participation that a national finding aid aggregation will require to be sustainable.

Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) August 2023 Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series

More info: https://www.cni.org/topics/special-collections/research-findings-from-the-building-a-national-finding-aid-network-project

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