Regents of the University of California

The California Digital Library - in collaboration with OCLC and the University of Virginia Library, and in close partnership with LYRASIS and state/regional aggregators - will conduct a research and demonstration project to build the foundation for a national archival finding aid network. Building on a 2018-2019 planning initiative, this project will leverage community engagement to move toward a unified, inclusive, comprehensive, and stable national finding aid network. Work will take place in parallel across multiple focus areas, including: research investigating end-user and contributor needs in relation to finding aid aggregations and evaluating the quality of existing finding aid data; technical assessments of potential systems to support network functions and formulating system requirements for a minimum viable product instantiation of the network; and community building, sustainability planning, and governance modeling to support subsequent phases moving from a project to a program for sustainability beyond this award's period of performance.