Building a National Finding Aid Network
OCLC Research was a partner on the California Digital Library-led, IMLS-funded project NAFAN to build the foundations for a national finding aid discovery infrastructure in the United States. OCLC led research efforts that would inform project outcomes.
Supplemental Materials
Tools
The following tools were used in the NAFAN project for data collection and analysis.
Focus Group Interview Protocol – Aggregators
Script questions used in interviews with archivists who participate in an aggregation of archival description
Download the .PDF
Focus Group Interview Protocol -- Non-Aggregators: script questions used in interviews with archivists who do not participate in an aggregation of archival description
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Focus Group Interview Participant Screening Form: brief survey used to gather information from archivists interested in participating in focus group interviews
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Focus Group Interview Codebook: Summary of codes, code definitions, and coding rules used to analyze focus group interviews
Download the .XLSX
User Interview Protocol: script of questions used in all user interviews
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User Interview Codebook: Summary of codes, code definitions, and coding rules used to analyze user interviews
Download the .XLSX
Findings Data
Findings data from the NAFAN Pop-Up Survey and EAD Analysis are available in the following outputs:
User Pop-Up Survey Data Summary Charts: Charts summarizing findings from all questions asked in the pop-up survey
Download the .PDF
NAFAN EAD Data Dashboard

The NAFAN EAD Data Dashboard documents our EAD data analysis of a corpus of 145,000+ EAD XML files from regional archival aggregators across the US. It includes:
- Tables summarizing an analysis of the structure and consistency of EAD tag usage, with detailed element counts
- Summaries of investigations into EAD tag and attribute value usage patterns that focus on specific research questions
User Pop-Up Survey Public Data Set and Data Dictionary
To request a copy of the anonymized data set from the NAFAN user pop-up survey and an accompanying data dictionary, please fill out the data request form.