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I was delighted to see the announcement this week that the SNAC (Social
Networking and Archival Context) cooperative program had received
second phase funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I have
reproduced the full announcement below; it is also available at
http://news.library.virginia.edu/2017/10/24/social-networks-and-archival-context-cooperative/
This is a hugely important project that should lead to essential
infrastructure for libraries, special collections, archives, and
scholarship broadly. In the longer term, it may be important in
changing the way documentary editing is done, and help to advance the
development and sharing of digital factual biographies. I believe that
anyone who deals with archives or special collections should be
tracking this work.
We have had several reports on this effort at CNI meetings, and will
continue to track developments. I've also been serving as in an
advisory role to the project.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
---------------------------------------------------
October 21, 2017
snaccooperative.org
The University of Virginia Library is pleased to announce that the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of Virginia
$750,000 to complete the work of establishing the Social Networks and
Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative. For this final phase of
establishing the Cooperative, the University of Virginia Library is
collaborating with the U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration and 27 other Cooperative members.
About SNAC
The SNAC Cooperative aspires to improve the economy and quality of
archival processing and description, and, at the same time, to
address the longstanding research challenge of discovering, locating,
and using distributed historical records by building a global
social-document network using both computational methods and human
curation.
SNAC began as a Research and Demonstration (R&D) project with funding
from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2010-2012), followed
by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2012-2015). The
project demonstrated the feasibility of separating the description of
persons, families, and organizationsˇXincluding their
social-intellectual networksˇXfrom the description of the historical
resources that are the primary evidence of their lives and work. SNAC
also demonstrated that the biographical-historical data extracted and
assembled can be used to provide researchers with convenient,
integrated access to historical collections held by archives and
libraries around the world.
The initial results of the research made it clear that the potential
power of the assembled data to transform research and improve the
economy and effectiveness of archival descriptive practices required
more than computational methods: it also needed human curation. With
funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the SNAC developers performed detailed
planning from 2012ˇV2015 on how best to transform the R&D into a
sustainable international cooperative that would enable archivists,
librarians, and scholars to maintain the descriptive data and to
extend the scope of the people and records included.
With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the SNAC team has
completed Phase I (2015ˇV2017) of establishing the Cooperative based
on the detailed planning, focusing on community building and
transforming the R&D technical infrastructure into a platform that
will support editorial curation of the data as well as batch
ingestion of data.
From 2010 to 2017, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia served as the lead
institution for SNAC. During this period, IATH led three different
endeavors: R&D (2010ˇV2015), Cooperative planning (2011ˇV2015), and
Phase I of establishing the Cooperative (2015ˇV2017). The California
Digital Library, the School for Information Science at the University
of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration were important collaborators in these activities.
SNAC is now moving to the University of Virginia Library, which will
serve as its administrative and technological home. The move to the
University Library will ensure close collaborations and partnerships
with the cultural heritage and research communities. Daniel Pitti,
who has led the development of SNAC since its inception, will
continue to serve as its director. Ivey Glendon will join the project
to provide expertise in metadata and program management, and John
Hott will lead the technological development.
Cooperative Members
As the University of Virginia Library begins completing the work of
establishing the Cooperative, the membership has expanded from 17 to
29 members, and now includes two international archives, a U.S. state
archive, two documentary editing projects, an independent scholar,
and several new academic research libraries. Over the course of the
current project period, additional members will be added as the
Cooperative builds the capacity to ingest new sets of data and train
editors.
- American Institute of Physics
- American Museum of Natural History
- Archives, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute
of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India
- Archives nationales de France
- Brigham Young University
- California Digital Library
- Cecilia Preston (independent scholar)
- George Washington University
- Getty Research Institute
- Harvard University
- Indiana UniversityˇVPurdue University Indianapolis
- Jane Addams Papers
- Library of Congress
- Mojave Desert Archives
- National Archives and Records Administration
- New York Public Library
- Princeton University
- Smith College
- Smithsonian Institution
- Tufts University
- University of California, Irvine
- University of Miami
- University of Nebraska
o Library
o Walt Whitman Archive
- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- University of Oregon
- University of Virginia
- Utah State Archives
- Yale University
Objectives
The second and final phase of establishing the Cooperative has both
social and technological objectives. The social objectives include
developing a business model that will ensure long term
sustainability, further developing editorial policies and standards,
and being able to offer three forms of training for editors: on-site
and remote as well as online self-guided. There will be many
technological objectives, but chief among them will be the following:
developing ˇ§cooperative ingest toolsˇ¨ that will enable
data-contributing institutions to collaborate in refining and
ingesting data into SNAC, and in return to receive persistent
identifiers to enhance their descriptive data; refining and enhancing
the History Research Tool for researchers; completing development of
the key components of the technical infrastructure; and performing
computational refinement and enrichment of existing SNAC data.
A major focus will be on expanding capacity in training editors and
ingesting new batches of data. Progress in these two areas will
enable the Cooperative to vastly expand membership and the global
social-document network represented in SNAC.
For additional information, please contact Daniel Pitti
(dpitti@virginia.edu) or Ivey Glendon (img7u@virginia.edu)
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