Grants and Acquisitions

The University of Virginia Library has received $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to complete the work of establishing the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative. SNAC began as a Research and Demonstration project with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2010–2012), followed by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2012–2015). The project demonstrated the feasibility of separating the description of persons, families, and organizations—including their social-intellectual networks—from the description of the historical resources that are the primary evidence of their lives and work. For this final phase of establishing the Cooperative, the University of Virginia Library is collaborating with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and 27 other cooperative members. The SNAC Cooperative aspires to improve the economy and quality of archival processing and description, and, at the same time, to address the longstanding research challenge of discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records by building a global social-document network using both computational methods and human curation.