GENERAL UPDATE: Grant Leads to Creation of the Indigenous Description Group!
The Indigenize SNAC project received a grant from IMLS, which led to the creation of the Indigenous Description Group (IDG).
As a part of SNAC governance and working within SNAC’s Editorial and Standards Working Group, this new group formed in 2022 to address specific needs for Indigenous description in SNAC: The Indigenous Description Group (IDG), modeled after SNAC’s Enslaved Description Group, will inform, guide and monitor special efforts within the cooperative. We hope that this group outlives our Grant Funded project, continuing long-range work on…
- Identifying and implementing updates to the Editorial Guide for Indigenous Entity Descriptions in SNAC
- Continuing long-term Indigenous editor engagement
- Informing and contributing to controlled vocabularies: topical subjects, placenames, languages and orthographies
The IDG is comprised of several library, archives and museum professionals from all over and has been further broken down into subgroups to aid in focusing on the many different arenas that make aggregated archival tools tick. We’ve talked about ways to describe and link community names in the way that subject guides do and to think relationally about communities and make communities the central nodes in a constellation of records or other entities without relying on subject headings. On the education and outreach front, we have discussed ways to develop partnerships, secure future funding for larger projects and ways to reimagine and revitalize our SNACSchool program to be more accessible.
Most importantly, we hope that the IDG will allow us to center Indigenous narratives and history by thinking about SNAC as an Indigenous discovery tool!
Stay tuned to see more!
