The UCI Libraries is excited to join the University of Virginia, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and 26 other Cooperative members on Phase II of the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative program. This second and final phase of establishing the Cooperative (2017-2019) is generously funded by a $750 thousand grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Virginia and is collaboration with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and 27 other Cooperative members.
This phase of establishing the Cooperative has both social and technological objectives. The social objectives include developing a business model that will ensure long-term sustainability, further developing editorial policies and standards, and being able to offer three forms of training for editors: on-site and remote as well as online self-guided. There will be many technological objectives, but chief among them will be the following: developing “cooperative ingest tools” that will enable data-contributing institutions to collaborate in refining and ingesting data into SNAC, and in return to receive persistent identifiers to enhance their descriptive data; refining and enhancing the History Research Tool for researchers; completing development of the key components of the technical infrastructure; and performing computational refinement and enrichment of existing SNAC data.
A major focus will be expanding capacity in training editors and ingesting new batches of data. Progress in these two areas will enable the Cooperative to vastly expand membership and the global social-document network represented in SNAC.
For additional information, please contact Daniel Pitti (dpitti@virginia.edu) or Ivey Glendon (img7u@virginia.edu)