The Social Networks and Archival
Context (SNAC) Project is in its infancy and it has the potential to become
another tool in our genealogist toolkit.
We
always have the issue of information that we seek being stored in disparate and
dispersed collections and it takes a lot of effort to identify, locate and
correlate these data sources with the person, place or event we are researching. This tool has the potential to facilitate our
research. It’s unlikely that your ancestors will be directly found and others
in the community or those for whom better records survive (e.g. a biggy wig who
lived nearby) might help guide us to material that will help with our own
family history research.
SNAC is
addressing a longstanding research challenge: discovering, locating, and using
distributed historical records. Scholars use these records as primary evidence
for understanding the lives and work of historical persons and the events in
which they participated. These records are held in archives and manuscript
libraries, large and small, around the world. Scholars may need to search
scores of different archives one by one, following clues, hunches, and leads to
find the records relevant to their topic. Furthermore, descriptive practices
may differ from one archive or library to another. The research is time
consuming and inefficient: clues and leads may be easily overlooked and
important resources undiscovered.
The data
needed to address this research challenge already exists in the guides,
catalogs, and finding aids that archivists and librarians create to document
and provide access to the archival resources. It is buried in isolated guides
and finding aids that are stored in different, isolated systems.
As
a visual person and believer in the concept that pictures can speak a 1000
words, here is a sample from SNAC for Bennett Henderson Young.
What do you think? Will
such linked information benefit your family history research?
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