The Social Networks and Archival Context Cooperative (SNAC): What, Who, and How
Daniel Pitti
The SNAC Cooperative began as a research and demonstration project in 2010, and in 2015 began a transition to an ongoing cooperative program. The presentation will be divided into three short segments, with each followed by discussion. The first segment will describe the public historical research reference resource that is being cooperatively built and maintained. It will cover the nature and quantity of the content and a demonstration of functional features. The second segment will describe the institutional members, and how the archivists, librarians and volunteers are working together to build and maintain SNAC. The final segment will describe the technology platform and maintenance interface (manual editing and API), and will demonstrate tools being developed, including a SNAC extension to OpenRefine.
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Daniel Pitti is the director of the Social Networks and Archival Context Cooperative (SNAC), University of Virginia Library; and chair of the International Council on Archives Expert Group on Archival Description (ICA EGAD). From 1997 until 2017, Pitt served as the associate director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). During his time in IATH, Pitti participated in the design and implementation of many of the faculty fellows' projects, as well as being the principal architect of two international archival description standards, Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). Based on EAC-CPF, Pitti launched SNAC in 2010 as an R&D project. In 2015 SNAC became a cooperative program, currently with 29 member repositories. SNAC has received funding from NEH (2010-2012), IMLS (2011-2013), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2012-2019). As chair of ICA EGAD, Pitti is leading the development of the Records in Contexts (RiC) standard that aspires to be the foundation of next-generation archival description and access. Prior to coming to UVa in 1997, Pitti served as the Librarian for Advanced Technology Projects at the University of California, Berkeley.
