The State of the Cooperative
With over 3.5 million identity constellations and hundreds of trained editors from institutions like the Smithsonian and Library of Congress, we’re strengthening editorial standards, technical infrastructure, and outreach efforts to make archival knowledge more accessible and accurate. Major initiatives presented included expansion of SNACSchool training, progress on reparative description through the Enslaved and IndigenizeSNAC projects, and technical advances such as OpenRefine workflows and ArchivesSpace integration. Click the button below to explore all of these presentations and more in our virtual theatre space of past State of the Cooperative events.
Governance
Using a cooperative model where working groups and committees work together toward a common goal, the SNAC Cooperative builds reliable descriptions of people, families, and organizations that link to and provide a contextual understanding of historical records. Groups and committees meet periodically to work on mostly self-directed projects aimed at improving SNAC overall by helping researchers discover primary source documents by linking them across time and place.
Administration
Director: Jerry Simmons, University of Virginia
Lead Developer: Robbie Hott, University of Virginia
Technology Lead: Jason Jordan, University of Virginia
Creator and Former Director: Daniel Pitti, Retired, University of Virginia
Operations
Jerry Simmons, SNAC Director, University of Virginia
Diana Marsh, PI - #IndigenizeSNAC Project, University of Maryland
Sarah Wells, Director - IATH, University of Virginia
Scotty Beland, Chair - Outreach Working Group, University of Maryland
Maristella Feustle, Chair - Technical Infrastructure Working Group, University of North Texas
Ugoma Smoke, Chair - Editorial Standards Working Group, University of Maryland
Ia Bull, Lead - Indigenous Description Group, University of Maryland
Bernetiae Reed, Lead - Enslaved Description Group, Researcher/Genealogist
Technical Infrastructure Working Group
Chair: Maristella Feustle
The Technical Infrastructure Group has four primary roles. 1) Based on recommendations from the Editorial Policy and Standards Group, the Technology Group provides consultation, feedback, and develop specifications for implementing policy requirements. 2) The Technology Group also evaluates and recommend computational batch data refinement when needed across the entire SNAC corpus. 3) It identifies member data refinement needs and refinement tool opportunities that would benefit members in improving the quality of local data that is related to SNAC data. 4) Finally, it works with the Technology Lead in working with outside developers that are building or planning to build SNAC editing and data exchange tools using the SNAC API.
Editorial Standards Working Group
Chair: Ugoma Smoke
The Editorial Policy and Standards Group’s responsibilities include developing editorial policy and standards to ensure reliable, consistent, and sourced (based on cited evidence) description of CPF entities, and the quality of controlled terms used in the description.
Outreach Working Group
Chair: Scotty Beland
The SNAC Outreach Working Group facilitates outreach, Cooperative-wide information sharing, and promotes SNAC as a reference and research tool. Among the Working Group’s responsibilities are:
- Assessment and creation of internal and external communication plans for the Cooperative
- Communication materials for wider outreach efforts to increase membership, SNACSchool and Train-the-Trainer awareness
- Promote SNAC initiatives and technical releases
- Promote SNAC as a research resource for reference professionals and researchers
- Collate and disseminate user, member, and researcher feedback throughout the Cooperative and beyond.
SNACSchool Team
The SNACSchool Team is charged with developing, maintaining, and executing a formal, comprehensive training program for member editors of the SNAC Cooperative. A comprehensive SNAC training program should include:
- Understanding SNAC history and background
- Searching in SNAC for reference and research
- Understanding SNAC data
- Creating SNAC records
- Editing SNAC records
- Citing sources as supporting evidence in SNAC records
- Managing archival resources (finding aids and other descriptions) described in SNAC
- Merging SNAC records
The ultimate goal is for SNAC editors to work independently after a sufficient review period.
Organizational Chart
History and Development
Objective
SNAC is addressing a longstanding research challenge: discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records. Scholars use these records as primary evidence for understanding the lives and work of historical persons and events in which they participated. These records are held in archives and manuscript libraries, large and small, around the world. Scholars may need to search scores of different archives one by one, following clues, hunches, and leads to find the records relevant to their topic. Furthermore, descriptive practices can differ from one institution to another. The research is time consuming and inefficient: clues and leads may be easily overlooked and important resources undiscovered.
The data needed to address this research challenge already exists in the guides, catalogs, and finding aids that archivists and librarians create to document and provide access to archival resources. However, it is largely buried in guides and finding aids that are stored in different, isolated systems SNAC seeks to meet this challenge by separating the description of persons, families, and organizations—including their socio-historical contexts—from the description of the historical resources that are the primary evidence of their lives and work. By separating this description and making these descriptions available in one online database location, SNAC provides researchers with convenient, integrated access to historical collections held by multiple private and public archives and libraries around the world, while also setting the stage for a cooperative program for maintaining information about the people documented in the collections.
Phase 1: Establishing a Framework
In 2010, with funding from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, SNAC began to explore the value of extracting the biographical and historical data about the individuals who created or are documented in archival records from online record descriptions. This data was then assembled into a collection of descriptions showing the individuals, families, and organizations and how they are interrelated with one another and with the archival resources that document their lives. SNAC next used the collection of descriptions to build a History Research Tool that 1) integrates and simplifies access to the dispersed resources and 2) provides unprecedented access to the biographical-historical contexts of the people documented in the resources, including the social-professional-intellectual networks within which they lived.
It quickly became apparent to the SNAC team that, while it was quite feasible to extract the data and use it to build a research tool, computational techniques alone would not fully realize the potential power of the assembled data to both transform research and improve the economy and effectiveness of archival descriptive practices. To accomplish these complementary objectives, it would also be necessary to develop an ongoing, sustainable international cooperative that would enable archivists, librarians, scholars, and, eventually, content specialists to maintain and add biographical-historical data and to extend the scope of the people and historical resources covered.
Phase 2: Building the Cooperative
With additional funding from the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SNAC continued its research and development work through 2015, increasing the quantity and diversity of the data sources and improving the technical methods.
In 2015, the core team, which included the University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities; the University of California, Berkeley School of Information; and the California Digital Library, (part of the University of California), transformed this research into an international cooperative hosted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Thus the cooperative program was begun, focusing on the development of a governance infrastructure, technical infrastructure and sustainability, and the end-user experience.
Phase 3: Expanding Capacity and Community
Building on its establishment as an international cooperative, SNAC has entered a phase focused on sustainability, technical innovation, and community-driven growth. Administration and governance continue to be supported in part by institutional membership fees, which primarily sustain core infrastructure, including the maintenance of SNAC’s technical environment hosted by the University of Virginia Library’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. At the same time, grant funding—particularly from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Maryland’s IndigenizeSNAC project—has enabled ongoing technical development and the expansion of key initiatives such as SNACSchool and the revitilization of our Working Groups, reflecting a growing emphasis on training, engagement, and collaborative participation.
This phase is also defined by the increasing impact of member-driven technical initiatives. Collaborative projects have advanced tools such as the OpenRefine and ArchivesSpace plugins, which support large-scale data ingestion and more seamless integration of SNAC authority data into local systems. Looking ahead, SNAC is pursuing enhancements to its internal controlled vocabularies, expanding variant name searching, and implementing Records in Context (RiC) relationships to support more precise and expressive contextual descriptions. Together, these developments position SNAC to continue evolving as a dynamic, cooperative resource for connecting people, organizations, and archival materials.
