Get to Know Us

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

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, Co-Chair - Editorial Standards Working Group, University of Maryland

Chris Tanguay, Co-Chair - Editorial Standards Working Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ia Bull, Lead - Indigenous Description Group, University of Maryland

Bernetiae Reed, Lead - Enslaved Description Group, Researcher/Genealogist

Chair: Maristella Feustle

The Technology 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.

Co-Chairs: Ugoma Smoke and Chris Tanguay

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, Iit 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.

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.