Social Networks and Archival Context: From Project to Cooperative Archival Program

Abstract

This article highlights the objectives and outcomes of the multi-year Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) research and demonstration project and discusses related developments to establish a large-scale sustainable cooperative for maintaining information about creators of archival collections, leveraging the Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) standard. The article discusses processes developed to derive EAC-CPF records from existing EAD finding aids, MARCXML records, and original authority records, enrichment of those records from other sources, and the creation of a prototype research resource, providing integrated access to dispersed archival collections and the social-historical context of the collections.

KEYWORDS:

• Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies
• Persons
• and Families
• EAC-CPF
• Encoded Archival Description
• EAD
• archival description

Notes

¹ Society of American Archivists and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, “Encoded Archival Context—Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF).” Accessed December 2013, http://eac.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/.

² Society of American Archivists and Library of Congress, “EAD Version 2002 Official Site.” Accessed December 2013, http://www.loc.gov/ead/.

³ Kenneth M. Price and Ed Folsom, “Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work,” in The Walt Whitman Archive. Accessed December 2013, http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00152.html#app.

⁴ Peter Scott, “The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,” American Archivist 29 (October 1966): 493–504. In the 1980s, several articles appeared in support of separation: Richard H. Lytle, “Intellectual Access to Archives,” American Archivist 43 (Winter and Spring 1980): 191–207; Richard H. Lytle and David A. Bearman, “The Power of the Principle of Provenance,” Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985–1986): 14–27; Max J. Evans, “Authority Control: An Alternative to the Record Group Concept,” American Archivist 50 (1986): 240–261; David A. Bearman and Richard Szary, “Beyond Authorized Headings, Authorities as Reference Files in a Multi-disciplinary Setting” in Authority Control Symposium, Occasional Papers of the Art Library Society of North America, no. 6 (Tucson: Art Library Society of North America, 1987): 69–78.

⁵ International Council on Archives, “ISAAR (CPF): International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families, 2nd Edition,” accessed December 2013, http://www.ica.org/10203/standards/isaar-cpf-international-standard-archival-authority-record-for-corporate-bodies-persons-and-families-2nd-edition.html.

⁶ The first phase of SNAC included the following project team members: Daniel Pitti (Project Director), Worthy Martin (Co-Director), Krishna Janakiraman, Ray Larson, Brian Tingle, and Adrian Turner. It also included the following Advisory Board members: Jodi Allison-Bunnell, Scot French, Edward Gaynor, Mary Lacy, and Michelle Light. The second phase of SNAC includes the following project team members: Daniel Pitti (Project Director), Worthy Martin (Co-Director), Terry Catapano, Rachael Hu, Krishna Janakiraman, Ray Larson, Tom Laudeman, Yiming Liu, Tom Lynch, Sara Sprenkle, Brian Tingle, Adrian Turner, Sarah Wells, and Katherine Wisser. It also includes the following Advisory Board members: Ed Ayers, Michael Fox, Alan Liu, Susan Perdue, Kenneth Price, Michael Rush, Jerry Simmons, and Anne Van Camp.

⁷ University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, “Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC),” accessed December 2013, http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/.

⁸ The following archival consortia are contributing EAD-encoded finding aids to the second phase of SNAC: Archives Florida, ArchivesHub (UK), Arizona Archives Online, EAD FACTORY (OhioLink), Five Colleges, Maine Archival Collections Online (MACON), Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA), Online Archive of California, Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), Rhode Island Archival & Manuscript Collections Online (RIAMCO), Rocky Mountain Online Archive (RMOA), Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO), and Virginia Heritage. The following individual archival repositories are also contributing EAD-encoded finding aids: American Philosophical Society, Archives nationales (France), Archives of American Art, Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF Archives et manuscripts, French Union Catalog, Brigham Young University, Center for Jewish History, Church of Latter Day Saints Archives, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Harvard University, Indiana University, Library of Congress (publicly available without restriction), Minnesota Historical Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, National Library of Medicine, New York Public Library, New York University, North Carolina State, Northwestern University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Syracuse University, University of Alabama, University of Chicago, University of Connecticut, University of Delaware, University of Florida, University of Illinois, University of Kansas, University of Maryland, University of Michigan Bentley & Special Collections, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, University of Utah, Utah State Archives, Utah State University, and Yale University.

⁹ Ray R. Larson and Krishna Janakiraman, “Connecting Archival Collections: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project,” in TPDL 2011: Proceedings of Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries Conference, Berlin Sept 26–28, LNCS 6966 (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011), 3–14.

¹⁰ California Digital Library, “ARK (Archival Resource Key) Identifiers.” Accessed December 2013, https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/Curation/ARK

¹¹ Razvan Bunescu and Marious Pasça, “Using Encyclopedic Knowledge for Named Entity Disambiguation,” in 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics : EACL 2006, E06-1002 (Trento, Italy: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2006), 6.

¹² Amit Bagga and Brett Baldwin. “Entity-Based Cross-Document Coreferencing Using the Vector Space Model,” in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 1 (Montreal: Université de Montréal, 1998), 79–85.

¹³ Gideon S. Mann and David Yarowsky, “Unsupervised Personal Name Disambiguation,” in Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Natural Language Learning at HLT-NAACL 2003, Volume 4 (Morristown, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2003), 33–40.

¹⁴ David A. Smith and Gregory Crane, “Disambiguating Geographic Names in a Historical Digital Library,” In Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: ECDL 2001 (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2001), 127–136.

¹⁵ Larson and Janakiraman, “Connecting Archival Collections.”

¹⁶ Some of our research in this area is described in R.R. Larson and K. Janakiraman, “Connecting Archival Collections.”

¹⁷ California Digital Library, “XTF: eXtensible Text Framework,” accessed December 2013, http://xtf.cdlib.org/.

¹⁸ The library community has recently begun moving beyond an almost exclusive focus on authority control to include additional descriptive data such as occupations, functions, dates of existence, sex, languages used, and brief biographical and historical notes. Expanding the scope of library authority records beyond name control to include essential identity information may be in response to the challenge of computational identity resolution when combining descriptions from multiple authority files, for example, in VIAF. Names are weak identifiers, and thus additional facts are essential in establishing unique identities. Though RDA moves library practice closer to archival practice, the detail and depth of archival context description presents data representation needs not currently accommodated in library practice.

¹⁹ The display currently does not distinguish between the relative significance of people, families, and organizations who are associated with or who corresponded with the subject of the record. There is insufficient data in the EAD and MARC21 instances at this time to determine this, although this would make an excellent area of research in the future. The number of occurrences of a named person, family, or organization within the source EAD and MARC21 instances—in relationship to the subject of the record— could potentially be used to develop an effective weighting.