n. (abbr. SNAC)an online collaborative project that assimilates descriptions of corporate bodies, persons, and families to support discovering, locating, and using distributed cultural heritage resourcesPitti et al. 2015In addition to pioneering methods for the creation and discovery of EAC-CPF records, SNAC has the long-term objective of setting the stage for a cooperative program for maintaining them.Crowe and Clair 2015The Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) project has focused on extracting most or all of the authority data from EAD finding aids or MARC records that are part of existing, large pools of records—the Library of Congress, Online Archive of California, and so forth. SNAC has chosen to focus on the mass production and disambiguation of as many unique archival authority records as possible—not only creating the records but creating a process to identify matching authority records in the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF), Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), and Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) and using the data in these authority files to enhance the EAC-CPF records.Herbert, Simmons, and Wilkinson 2020, 4In 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.SNAC 2020SNAC is a free, online resource that helps users discover biographical and historical information about persons, families, and organizations that created or are documented in historical resources (primary source documents) and their connections to one another. Users can locate archival collections and related resources held at cultural heritage institutions around the world. ¶ SNAC is an international cooperative including, but not limited to, archives, libraries, and museums, that is working to build a corpus of reliable descriptions of people, families, and organizations that link to and provide a contextual understanding of historical records.
