CONSTELLATIONS What SNAC Is Doing and How to Get Involved Dina Herbert, Jerry Simmons, and Elizabeth Wilkinson, Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) SNAC) M ost archivists have been on both sides of the archives—as users and as professionals—so we’re familiar with the frustration of users unable to find what they’re looking for or to make connec-tions among persons, families, and corporate bodies. That’s where SNAC comes to the rescue! the Smithsonian Institution Archives, and others. How It Works Let’s use the example of John Alexander Pope to explore the possibilities of SNAC. John Pope was an expert on Chinese and Japanese blue-and-white ceramics and spent most of his professional life at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art. Even without SNAC, we know this blue-blooded prep school student, born in 1906, found his passion when he -worked as a secretary and ambu-lance driver for the American Red Cross Mission in China after he graduated from Yale. Looking at Pope’s resources and their holdings repositories, you can see that many of ole them relate to his professional role Photos from John Alexander as a museum curator—he’s the Pope’s scrapbooks during the 1927 creator of his archival papers at Morrissey Expedition. Courtesy of the National Archives Catalog. the Freer Gallery and is referenced in James Cahill’s papers (another curator at the Freer). But SNAC shows he is also the creator of the Pope Diaries, related to the Morrissey Expedition of 1927, at the National Archives. Dig deeper into his relationships and you see that Pope is associated with Cahill and a member of the 1927 Baffin Island Expedition. How would a scholar of East Asian art and director of a major museum end up in the frozen north? And how does SNAC help us with this? It turns out that before his trip to China with the Red Cross, Pope was sent by his parents to Baffin Island to forget about his college girlfriend. Captain Bob Bartlett piloted the Schooner Effie M. Morrissey, under the direction of George Palmer Putnam, to explore this Arctic island in Northern Canada. Pope kept diaries and scrapbooks of the summer he spent on the ship and those made their way to the National Archives. This summer vacation not only made him forget his girlfriend, it gave him a bug for travel, eventually leading him to China. Nowhere in the historical record does it show the creation of these archival materials. Users researching polar explorations would not know what happened to young Pope after his summer up north. Similarly, users looking into his life as a museum professional might January/February 2020 SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) is a free, online resource that helps users discover biographical and historical information about persons, families, and organizations who created or are documented in primary sources—and discover their connections to each other ( https://snaccooperative.org/ ). By using EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and EAC–CPF (Encoded Archival Context – Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families), SNAC addresses the problem of the archival diaspora, revealing collections and connections and allowing users to find information that would have taken months of research to locate. It also serves as a name authority database for professionals, allowing us to consolidate all the variants of names of creators or entities. The Genesis of SNAC In 2010, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, SNAC began investigating the value of extracting biographical and historical data about the individuals who created or are documented in archival records from online record descriptions. These descriptions helped build a History Research Tool (HRT) that integrates and simplifies access to the dispersed resources and provides the biographical-historical contexts of the people documented in the resources. In 2015, the project entered Phase II, thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The core team included the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities; the University of California, Berkeley School of Information; the California Digital Library (part of the University of California); and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In Phase II, the HRT was refined for better use. The descriptions that constitute the bulk of the source data for the work are in three forms: t Detailed guides or finding aids that are encoded using EAD. t Summary descriptions of archival collections that use the library standard MARC21. t Original descriptions of people (traditionally described as authority records and represented in a wide variety of nonstandard formats). Currently SNAC is working with nearly 190,000 finding aids contributed by repositories; 2.2 million MARC21 descriptions con-tributed by OCLC WorldCat; and approximately 500,000 original descriptions of people contributed by the British Library, NARA, 4 ARCHIVAL OUTLOOK
Archival Outlook January/February 2020: Page 4
