Social Networks and Archival Context

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (University of Virginia; IATH) in collaboration with the School of Information (University of California, Berkeley; SI/UCB) and the California Digital Library (University of California; CDL) propose to vastly expand Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC)1, a research and demonstration project. Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the initial pilot phase of SNAC has demonstrated the potential for transforming scholarly historical research by dramatically improving access to resources that document the lives, work, and events surrounding historical persons, and by providing unprecedented access to the biographical-historical contexts of the people documented in the resources, including the social-professional networks within which the people lived and worked. In the next phase of the project, we propose to vastly expand the quantity and diversity of the source data, and extend and expand the research. While the immediate objectives of the project are to significantly refine and improve the effectiveness of the methods used in building and make an innovative research tool Internet-accessible, the long-term objective is to provide both methods and data as a solid foundation for establishing a sustainable national archival authorities program cooperatively governed by and maintained by the archive and library professional communities.2