Forum (February 2020)
National Forum on Archival Discovery and Delivery

Lighting the Way: A National Forum on Archival Discovery and Delivery took place over 2.5 days at Stanford University in Stanford, California from February 10-12, 2020. The event included approximately 70 participants, and focused on information sharing and collaborative problem solving around improving how user-facing systems support discovery and delivery for archives and special collections.
Plenary presentations and question and answer sessions on Day 1 of the Forum were livestreamed and recorded. To view presentations, visit the Presentations page. The project team synthesized the outputs of the Forum into Lighting the Way: A Preliminary Report on the National Forum on Archival Discovery and Delivery, a report published in November 2020.



The Forum leveraged proven exercises and techniques drawn from existing methodologies used in ideation sessions for human-centered design to address three primary goals:
To visualize, map, and build connections – between participants, their work, the systems they rely on, and the communities they serve.
To identify and organize around shared opportunities and challenges, identified by participants during group activities.
To provide a platform for engagement with the project, leading to participation in future project activities.