EAD Analysis: Findings from the Building a National Archival Finding Aid Network Project
Abstract
This report details the methods and findings from a quantitative analysis of a corpus of EAD encoded collection descriptions provided by current regional finding aid aggregators in the US. The analysis sought to assess current EAD data as raw material for building a finding aid aggregation by looking for common elements and data structures present in the data and probing for gaps that could impede user discovery of archival collections.
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.