SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context project - Towards an archival authority cooperative

Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) is a multi-year research and demonstration project that aims to address the longstanding research challenge of discovering, locating, and using distributed historical resources. It also seeks to redefine traditional online access points for those resources, by exposing information about the people, families, and organizations who created them in addition to their socio-historical contexts. Finally, SNAC endeavors to set the stage for a cooperative program for maintaining names of creators of archival materials, via the Encoded Archival Context - Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) standard. This demonstration will show the prototype access and search systems for the second phase of SNAC, incorporating over 2 million records derived from Encoded Archival Descriptions (EAD), MARC Archival Records and EAC-CPF records from over 40 repositories and consortia including the Library of Congress, ArchivesHub, Archives nationales, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and OCLC World-Cat.