Building on a 2018–2019 planning initiative, the California Digital Library—in collaboration with OCLC, the University of Virginia Library, LYRASIS, and state and regional aggregators—conducted a research and demonstration project to create the foundation for a national archival finding aid network. This IMLS funded project investigated 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; formulating system requirements for a minimum viable product instantiation of the network; and community building, sustainability planning, and governance modeling to support the implementation phase of this project.