Daniel Pitti
SNAC Cooperative Director
University of Virginia
Joseph Glass
SNAC Technology Lead
University of Virginia
The Social Network and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative provides a platform for describing historical persons and groups linked socially and to the historical records that document their lives and work. The collaboratively created and maintained description serves as a reference resource for researchers. The Cooperative currently has 58 library, archive, and museum members. The project update will cover a range of Cooperative community activities and technologies developed to support the activities. A major focus of the community is improving the descriptive representation of historically marginalized groups, with a particular focus on enslaved persons and indigenous/native persons and groups, as well as persons and groups that exploited these peoples. The activities related to this work involve developing policies and rules for ethical description that privileges self-identity. In support of this effort, the community has developed a platform for maintaining controlled concept vocabularies used in the description of people; for example, Slavery Era Demographic Groups, occupations, genders, and subject. The Cooperative also trains editors in description, and, to date, has trained hundreds of editors. A new course is now being offered to teach reference professionals and researchers how to optimally use SNAC for research. Other major technology developments include a plugin to OpenRefine that facilitates batch additions of data to SNAC, and a plugin to ArchivesSpace that facilitates both pushing/pulling data to/from SNAC.
