From The Chronicle of Higher Education
Projects Aims to Build Online Hub for Archival Materials
By Jennifer Howard
In death, as in life, people don't always leave their papers in order. Letters, manuscripts, and other pieces of evidence wind up scattered among different archives, leading researchers on a paper chase as they try to hunt down what they need for their work....
Now imagine a central clearinghouse for those records, an online hub researchers could consult to find archival materials.
That vision drives a project of Mr. Pitti's called the Social Networks and Archival Context Project, or SNAC. It's a collaboration between researchers and developers at IATH, the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information, and the California Digital Library. The project recently finished its pilot stage with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities....
Archives are idiosyncratic, and it's not always easy to tell whether a name refers to a particular individual or to different people with identical or similar names. One of Mr. Pitti's main collaborators is Ray R. Larson, a professor in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. He concentrates on what Mr. Pitti calls the "matching and merging" required to winnow out duplicate names, find variants of the same name, and so on. To do that Mr. Larson has tested several approaches, including machine learning, in which a computer is programmed to recognize, for example, common variations in spelling....
It's even possible to imagine that the result of this work, depending on what shape it takes, might one day dovetail with the proposed Digital Public Library of America. It could be "a natural fit," says Mr. Larson of UC-Berkeley. These days, libraries and archives "are seeing the advantage of pooling and sharing information rather than doing their own little thing."