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Finding Aid Aggregation at a Crossroads

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Finding Aid Aggregation at a Crossroads Finding Aid Aggregation at a Crossroads Prepared by Jodi Allison-Bunnell, AB Consulting Edited by Adrian Turner, California Digital Library 2019 May 20 ! This report was prepared for "Toward a National Finding Aid Network," a one-year planning initiative supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered in California by the State Librarian Table of Contents Executive Summary 2 Foundational Assumptions 3 Key Findings 3 Introduction 5 Methodology 5 Findings 6 Purpose and Value 6 Coverage and Scope 6 Resources 7 Infrastructure 7 End Users 8 Data Structure and Content 8 Organizational Considerations 9 A Composite Profile of Aggregators and Meta-Aggregators 9 Statewide and Regional Coverage of Aggregators 10 Extent of Institutions Contributing to Aggregators 11 Extent of Finding Aids Hosted by Aggregators 11 Growth Rate of Aggregators 12 Finding Aid Formats Hosted by Aggregators and Meta-Aggregators 13 Organizational Histories of Aggregators and Meta-Aggregators 14 User Audiences Served by Aggregations and Meta-Aggregators 16 Value Proposition: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Aspirations of Aggregators and Meta- Aggregators 16 Organizational Lifecycle Stages and Vitality of Aggregators and Meta-Aggregators 18 Infrastructure Used by Aggregators and Meta-Aggregators 20 Governance of Aggregations and Meta-Aggregations 23 Resources to Support Aggregations and Meta-Aggregations 23 Defunct Aggregations 28 Individual Archival Repositories and Relationships with Aggregators: Case Studies 29 Conclusion 31 Appendices 32 Data Gathering Instruments 32 Aggregator Profiles 32 Meta-Aggregator Profiles 32 Additional Reference 32 Definitions 32 List of Figures 33 !1 Executive Summary This report represents the first phase of the "Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network" planning initiative.1 Here, we are developing a collective understanding of the current landscape of archival description -- and in particular, finding aid aggregations -- as background for an exploration of how best to provide access to archival collections, ensure the long-term sustainability of that access, and plan for future developments in this space. Finding aid aggregations formed at the state and regional level over the last two decades in an effort to solve a problem internal to libraries and archives: overcoming barriers to creating and presenting structured, consistent, and interoperable archival description. Thanks to early investment by institutions, states, and funders, this aggregation project made significant progress and spawned sixteen aggregators across the country. However, several years on, these aggregators are now struggling to find sufficient resources to update their infrastructure, meet user needs for access to archival collections, and engage with some of the most promising advances in the field. This planning initiative situates finding aid aggregation at a crossroads by asking our community to consider what the future of creating, presenting, and sustaining archival descriptions should look like. Given the findings in this report, we feel it is incumbent upon us to ask ourselves some hard questions about where we are now and where we should be headed, including: " What does our current approach to finding aids and finding aid aggregation offer our users? Where do those approaches hinder access? " Is our current approach sustainable? If not, how do we create a more sustainable future? " Should we continue to maintain existing statewide and regional aggregations? Or might we begin to pivot and work collectively towards a more robust, sustainable, shared infrastructure that would enable access to collections at a national level? Either the status quo or change involves risks. But if we succeed in this effort, we have an opportunity to address a major gap in our scholarly communication infrastructure by creating a persistent, comprehensive, national-level aggregation of archival descriptions. Changing course towards developing shared infrastructure will require strong leadership and a coalition of the willing. Our research suggests that aggregators have differential levels of capacity and investment in maintaining their existing services--and hence, are likely to approach any collective action toward shared solutions with varied resources, commitment, and will. What we share, however, despite these differences is a deep commitment to providing persistent, high quality access to archival collections. This alone should be enough for us to agree that we must act now to protect this domain and chart a path forward to a sustainable, technically robust, and user-centered future for archival description aggregation. 1 Project wiki: https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/NAFAN . LSTA grant proposal: https:// www.library.ca.gov/Content/pdf/grantpdf/application/40-8847.pdf !2 Foundational Assumptions We began this study by postulating the following assertions regarding archival description and the researchers it serves. These assertions serve as a backdrop to finding aid aggregation: Finding aids are a fundamental research resource with an important role, but suffer from some limitations in their current form. ! They are valued and utilized by repositories and researchers to gain access to archival collections. ! They represent significant institutional investment in description and their creation requires many hours of professional time and a high level of expertise. ! Collection-level description is the main exposure mechanism for archives and manuscripts in academic libraries and government archives. The vast majority of these materials are not described at the item level. Beyond collection level descriptions, the metadata is very inconsistent and varies in how much it adds value. ! Not all cultural heritage institutions create them. Many non-academic libraries, museums, and other organizations do not produce finding aids. Instead, they tend to describe at the item level and to participate in digital collection aggregations. ! They do not necessarily need to be delivered in their current form. While archivists value the finding aid as a document, it is unclear whether they meet the needs of end users. We suspect changes in, but do not have a fully informed understanding of, the user audiences and how well they are served by any forms of archival description. " The user audience has expanded far beyond the academy during the time that aggregators have developed. Good search engine exposure means that a significant number of users come to archival descriptions without intending to. " Users seeking archival resources related to a particular topic or person do not necessarily want to limit their searches to materials held by repositories in a given state or region. In order to gain a comprehensive picture of the extent of materials available to them for research purposes, they may need to access the holdings of repositories across the US -- or even internationally. " We lack a broad understanding of how users interact with, navigate between, interpret, and utilize an expanding universe of descriptions that include finding aids, item-level descriptions, descriptions of creators, holding repositories, among others. We do, however, have significant literature on the more narrowly scoped problem of how end users interact specifically with finding aids and digital collections. Key Findings Our findings, based on surveys and interviews conducted with aggregators and meta- aggregators, are very much in alignment with the foundational assumptions we identified at the beginning of the study. Below is a high-level summary of our key findings: " Aggregators have helped increase the visibility and exposure of their contributors' finding aids, and expose connections between collections for researchers. Aggregators strongly perceive the continued value of aggregation, and are !3 committed to exposing collections from a broad array of institutions, and enabling access to collections for all researchers. " Current aggregations and meta-aggregations are not comprehensive in scope. Many institutions' finding aids are not represented because they do not participate, and institutions that do not create finding aids aren’t included. Additionally, our current meta-aggregations are fragile: They are based on links back to finding aids that must be persistently maintained by aggregators and individual institutions. " Aggregations are in many cases an add-on to local hosting. Thus, they do not alleviate a local cost and labor burden. " The development and launching of most aggregations has been enabled through initial grant funding. Organizations have faced subsequent challenges in resourcing, sustaining, and updating aging infrastructure. " The organizational structures and limited resources of current aggregators and meta-aggregators reveal a landscape ripe for evolution: a third of the current aggregators are evaluating their activities with the possibility of re-forming, merging, spinning off, or spinning down the service. Only a few aggregators are actively adding contributors or content. " Aggregators have implemented systems that are highly optimized for hosting, indexing, and displaying EAD finding aids, with no obvious choices for successor systems to replace aging infrastructure. These systems are generally siloed from other platforms with related content (e.g., digital collections)--and hence, end user access to finding aids and related content is siloed. The systems are also not
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