California Digital Library

OCLC conducted a series of focus group interviews with archivists and archives administrators from across the United States to investigate the needs of archivists and others who might contribute to a national archival aggregator for the Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN) grant. This report details the methods and findings from those focus group interviews and examines the needs of archives and archivists related to describing the collections in their care and contributing description to an archival aggregation.

From 2020–2023, OCLC conducted research as a partner on Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN), an IMLS-supported research and demonstration project to build the foundation for a national archival finding aid network to address the inconsistency and inequity of the current archival discovery landscape (LG-246349-OLS-20). The project was led by California Digital Library (CDL), with partners at OCLC, the University of Virginia Library, Shift Collective, and Chain Bridge Group.