 Hello and welcome. Thanks so much for taking the time to watch this video. I'm Chalice Scott Webber, a senior program officer with the OCLC Research Library Partnership, and I'll be sharing research findings from the Building and National Finding Aid Network project, or NAFAN. NAFAN is a two and a half year research and development project coordinated by the California Digital Library and supported by IMLS. Project partners included University of Virginia Libraries, Shift Collective, Chainbridge Group, and OCLC, with additional contributions from regional archival aggregator partners and advisory groups. Our vision for the project was to address the current fragmented and uneven state of archival discovery in the U.S. by laying the groundwork to establish an inclusive national level finding aid network that meets the needs of a more diverse set of end users and enables participation by a wider range of cultural heritage institutions. And importantly, addresses challenges in the current archival aggregation ecosystem by transitioning away from outmoded technologies and directly addressing foundational issues of sustainability. OCLC was tasked with leading research for the project, examining the needs of end users and archives related to aggregation, and with an assessment of the quality of existing archival descriptive data. In June, OCLC released five reports that form our deliverables for the project, four of the reports of findings from individual data collection and analysis efforts, and a summary report summarizing and synthesizing findings from across our work. That summary of findings will be our focus today. And the work I'm presenting here was carried out by a cross departmental team at OCLC with expertise in qualitative and quantitative research, archival data, and archival practice. And we were advised throughout the project by a fantastic group of archivists from a wide variety of types and sizes of archival institutions. We approached our work via a mixed methods research design, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, and analyzing them in relationship to each other. This included conducting focus group interviews with archivists, an online survey of more than 3300 end users of regional archival aggregators, individual semi-structured interviews with users, and an analysis of 145,000 EAD encoded finding aids. Today, I'll share summary findings from across these data collection and analysis activities, and our recommendations to the NAFAN project, given these findings. Going into the project, there was a sense from participants and our partners at regional aggregators that aggregation was valuable, but it was kind of a hand wavy, anecdotally driven idea of value. The guiding principle set out at the beginning of our work was that we needed to gather evidence to help us think more carefully about the value a national archival aggregation could offer users and participating archives. One way to think about value proposition is to identify the problem a system is trying to solve, and then articulate how the system will address that problem. The research identified challenges faced by both researchers and archivists than a national aggregation can address, as well as alignment between the needs of these two groups. I'll walk through the four overarching areas of needs that the research pointed to, and that we believe a national archival aggregation could address. So first address discovery challenges. In our interviews with researchers, the biggest challenge we heard about was how difficult it is to do archival research generally. Including how many places they needed to look to find archival collections and how long that search process takes. And this was across all types of users, even the most expert users still have to work quite hard to find archival collections. We also heard frustration with having to use multiple systems. And this was an issue also in using aggregators as regional aggregators have limited scope and multiple systems must be used to approximate a nationwide search. Some participants voiced concern also that they were not finding material held at smaller and community based archives and missing out on the stories that those repositories documented. When we spoke with archivists, they described being challenged to make their collections visible to a broad audience of researchers. They described a range of challenges with complex works workflows and insufficient resourcing and a lack of agency support or control over it services and systems. For some archives participating in an aggregation was the only way that they were able to make their collections visible on the web. Both researchers and archivists want an easy to use system that provides comprehensive discovery of archival collections across many institutions. Similarly, both groups of stakeholders were concerned not just with discovering individual collections, but also surfacing connections between collections. Archivists highlighted the importance of those connections given the deep interrelatedness of archival collections held across different institutions. And because of the sometimes fractured nature of archival collecting, which means that not all archival material by a single creator may end up in the same archive. And users desire systems that provide connections across collections, institutions and topics. And so we recommend that a key way a national aggregation can provide value is by making archival collections more visible and discoverable on the web and making connections between collections much more easily visible to users. The next area where now fan could provide value is in addressing access challenges. And this work was ostensibly focused on discovery. We of course heard a lot from about access from our user research. These are challenges that any archivist likely won't be surprised to hear about, but I have to say that it was really impactful for me to hear about them so clearly and consistently in our work. The key challenges are that in person research is prohibitive, often because of the expensive travel because of care taking and the care taking responsibilities that can limit travel. We also heard a lot about the vital intermediary role in helping people access archives that archivists play, whether they're doing so in person through a digital surrogate or through research for researcher for hire. Researchers need to interact with archivists to ask questions make appointments request remote research scans and licensing. And we heard a lot of frustration from researchers about how difficult it is to get the help they need. And this was exacerbated in aggregation settings. And lastly, both our pop up survey data and our interviews with users tell us that online access to digital collections is highly desired by researchers. We also heard repeatedly about the ways that digital content delivery is clunky and confusing for users. In our interviews we asked users, if you had a magic wand, what kind of a system would you create to access archives. They consistently told us that they wanted it to be easy for them to tell which repository holds a collection and to find contact information for that repository. To be able to find and understand their access policies and for when there was digital content to be able to easily identify and connect to it. And so these findings indicate that Nafan can create value by supporting access as well as discovery. Nafan should work to support access needs like planning for archival research trips and contacting individual archives. Because of barriers to doing in person archival research, a national aggregation can provide value by helping researchers discover collections held geographically close to them that they are more likely to be able to easily access. And of course access to digital content. Nafan can provide important value to researchers by considering how digital resources will be incorporated into aggregation features and interfaces to allow researchers to access digital digitized collections more easily. The next area where a national aggregation could provide value is in addressing archivist challenges in creating and publishing archival description. As well as the inefficiencies in participating in current archival aggregation systems that create redundant work for archivists and prevent participation in aggregation. In our focus group interviews with archivists, we heard a lot about these challenges. The top things we heard about that made it get more difficult for archivists to describe the collections in their care were complex workflows and workarounds, often involving multiple tools or systems that don't always play well together, making do with systems that weren't purpose built for archives and creating bespoke workarounds for the limitations of the systems in use. A major subset of this of these complex workflows were designed to produce EAD. Many participants described also having legacy archival description in multiple non structured or semi structured formats like word PDF and Excel or CSV files. This finding is tightly tied to the complex workflow findings. In many cases, managing and trying to migrate description in many formats necessitates keeping multiple clunky tools and systems going. These findings confirmed a belief that the NAFAN project team had from the outside of the project that a national aggregation would need to accept formats beyond in EAD in order to meet archives where they are in their descriptive program. Given the challenges of creating archival description broadly, along with the inconsistency of archival data we found in our EAD analysis, we also identified data remediation as a potential value that an aggregator could provide. We also heard about challenges related to contribution to archival aggregations. The primary barriers are a range of difficulties in contributing and maintaining records with the aggregator. The top barrier mentioned was having to comply with the aggregators data requirements, especially when they created additive work. Similarly, participants described how difficult it can be to update, edit or delete records that are represented in aggregation and were frustrated by the time they had to spend dealing with cumbersome systems. Difficulties in participating in aggregation exacerbated existing challenges in describing collections and a national aggregation could provide important value by supporting easier creation and sharing of archival description. The next area where NAFAN could provide important value is by working to make an intervention to help address the inequity in the archival landscape. Our research identifies that there is significant unevenness in the resources available to both archives and archival researchers, and that that has real impacts on the historical record, scholarship and knowledge access and dissemination. Some of the key challenges our research identified are about the visibility of collections, both end users and archivists were concerned with the visibility of collections held by small and underfunded archives. Users fear that they are not finding collections held in these institutions. Archivists are concerned with the diversity and inclusiveness of the archival record available to researchers. And the ability of colleagues in resource-strapped institutions to create and share archival description online. This is echoed in another key concern we heard about from archivists in our focus groups, the importance of support for participation from smaller and less well-funded institutions. Participants discussed the need for a more inclusive aggregation, one that was not built to privilege and benefit only large, well-funded and prestigious institutions. Participants offered some solutions to address the needs of smaller institutions and make it easier for them to participate in a national aggregation. In some cases, the people voicing these concerns were affiliated with small institutions themselves, and in others they were not. This may point to a need for further investigation into the needs of small and under-resourced institutions to ensure that the NAFAN project can provide value by addressing true rather than perceived needs. And then lastly, inequality and who can access archival collections. For me, this was one of the most striking things about doing this research was hearing directly from users about the challenges of accessing archival material and realizing just how inequitable access often is. Resource limitations and caregiving responsibilities impact users' ability to do in-person research. Some users were limited to working only with digital collections that they could access online. Users working in academic and cultural heritage settings cited using personal and professional networks to navigate the sometimes opaque ways that archives operate or to avoid barriers other researchers routinely had to deal with. A national aggregation could make an important intervention in this uneven landscape of access by really thinking about and addressing the information needs of a broad range of users. So another guiding principle set out at the beginning of the project was that we must design our work with sustainability in mind from the outset. In our research, we saw two key tensions that we think would be challenging to the sustainability of a national aggregation, and I'm going to talk briefly about those next. First, there is a tension between attitudes around aggregation data requirements, users' discovery desires, and archivist discovery expectations. Focus group interview participants described realities related to their descriptive resources and practices that do not easily align with the discovery functionality both users and archivists described as desirable. The top barrier that focus group interview participants identified to contributing to aggregation is having to comply with the aggregators data requirements indicating both the data format and data structure requirements for challenges. At the same time, both archivists and end users expressed desires and expectations related to discovery that require structured data. Discovery benefits were archivists most cited incentive to participate in aggregation. Primary among them was a desire to make it easier to discover connections between collections held at different repositories based on people organizations places and topical subjects. While a basic attempt at this might be accomplished with keyword searching structured data in the form of authorities or entities would support more sophisticated and reliable functionality to illuminate connections between collections. Researchers also expressed a strong desire for functions like advanced search filtering faceting and narrowing searches to a specific geographic area, all of which would rely on structured data. A simple intuitive and easy to use interface was another key expectation of both researchers and archivists. This functionality will be difficult to achieve with variable data structure and formats indexing a combination of structured and unstructured data may create challenges for search waiting and relevancy ranking. It also will create challenges for how to display search results and for creating understandable paths for users navigating from search results to finding aids and other content pages. Our data analysis further confirmed this tension. In our EAD tag analysis, we found uneven use of controlled access tags and other fields that might support functionality like faceting and sorting. And when we did more detailed content analysis, we found the data to have some big inconsistencies and gaps in comprehensively providing data that could power some of what researchers want like actionable links to digital content. The next major tension we identified was between cost expectations and resourcing realities. In the focus groups, we heard a national aggregation should support low barrier participation to a range of institutions and should have robust discovery features while at the same time being low or no cost. The desired features and community support identified by participants would require a significant level of monetary support and it is likely that contributors would need to bear a major portion of ongoing costs. I should note that that discussion of costs in the focus group interviews was abstract and occurred organically during the interviews. Our protocol did not include any questions directly about cost or request to react to examples of specific fees. So further investigation is required to assess what costs the archival community are willing to bear to participate and how the market might be segmented to shape a fee structure that is equitable across many types and sizes of institutions. Overall, our research indicates that there is significant value to be drawn from a national aggregation of archival description. And there are significant challenges to overcome to build the community of participation, a national finding aid aggregation will require to be sustainable. Our findings offer concrete guidance that can inform the next phases of the NAPAN project. I'll conclude with some brief information about what is next for NAPAN. I want to be clear that California Digital Library and not OCLC are coordinating this work, and they kindly pulled this information together for me to share with you today. So we, all of the project partners embarked on NAPAN to address fundamental problems of access, equity and sustainability pertaining to archival discovery and representation. Within the US context, we simply lack ongoing federal investments in core scholarly communication infrastructure and our current reliance on grant funds or a patchwork of in kind support is inadequate. NAPAN's vision is of a more robust and inclusive framework supporting the broadest set of researchers and archives from community to institutionally based. To realize this vision and meet the needs identified through this project, NAPAN must be a free service for any US based archive to participate in and for the public to utilize as a research resource. Financial support will be achieved through an opt in membership model. This is an opportunity for the community, particularly institutionally affiliated US based archives to commit resources to serving the variety of stakeholders whose voices have been so clearly surfaced and amplified through the project. We believe that NAPAN will bring enormous value to an all to all, including those best position to support it financially. The next phase will be focused on establishing and coordinating the institutional engagement necessary to build out NAPAN suite of systems and services. More information is coming later in a final report that CDL will publicly share, including through CNI channels. CDL will also soon be conducting market research to test the project's proposed sustainability model. And they're eager to talk to you about how your organization can be involved in NAPAN going forward. If you'd like to get more information, you can email NAPAN at ucop.edu or you can go to the NAPAN website and sign up for the mailing list at the at the URL here. That's it for me today. Please feel free to be in touch if you have any questions about the research and thanks so much.