Communications of the ACM
Project Aims to Build Online Hub for Archival Materials
Credit: Michael Clinard for Bloomberg Businessweek
The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC), developed by Daniel V. Pitti at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, seeks to build an online central clearinghouse for archival records.
SNAC's prototype Web site permits visitors to search for the names of individuals, corporate entities, or families to find related archival context records. SNAC's radial-graph feature enables researchers to probe an individual's social and cultural environment by generating a manipulable web of a subject's links as revealed in archival records, which fits with the project's core goal of visualizing social networks within which archival records were created.
To ensure that its data is good, SNAC in its first phase tapped thousands of finding aids from various sources. The second phase of the project will involve 13 state and regional archival consortia and more than 35 U.S., British, and French university and national repositories contributing records. The Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families standard was applied to SNAC's records, which "provides connections to this wealth of material that's out there," says the California Digital Library's Rachael Hu.
SNAC's large-scale demonstration of the viability of this strategy could inspire the widespread adoption of the standard by archives.
From Chronicle of Higher Education
View Full Article
No entries found