The Lighting the Way Handbook: Case Studies, Guidelines, and Emergent Futures for Archival Discovery and Delivery

The Lighting the Way Handbook: Case Studies, Guidelines, and Emergent Futures for Archival Discovery and Delivery represents the synthesis of work undertaken by participants in the Lighting the Way Working Meeting, held virtually in April-May 2021. The Working Meeting was organized as a practitioner-focused strategic thinking opportunity intended to explore topics related to archival discovery and delivery. Archival discovery and delivery is the phrase used by the Lighting the Way project describing what people, processes, and systems do to support finding, accessing, and using material from archives and special collections. It is intended to underscore the complexity and interdependence of the work, and to take a more expansive view of this work than one focused solely on archival functions as currently understood or as technical development and implementation. Working Meeting participants met in several facilitated sessions using techniques from Liberating Structures, an inclusive facilitation methodology, and followed an intentional progression of steps to generate and structure their ideas. The Lighting the Way Handbook includes case studies work from specific institutions, chapters exploring the impact of standards and best practices on archival discovery and delivery, and descriptions of emergent opportunities that advocate for new programmatic work, as well as an introduction that synthesizes the chapters and provides concrete recommendations about how to advance work on archival discovery and delivery.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, through grant LG-35-19-0012-19. The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.