University of Maryland

GENERAL and TEAM UPDATES:

We strive to keep up to date on SNAC and #IndigenizeSNAC happenings, and sometimes part of that means missing an update while some of the dust settles. Apologies for missing last month, but having said that, this update is jam-packed!

Edit-A-Thon

Due to the government shutdown, we have shifted our venue to the Folger Shakespeare Library to host the in-person component of our IndigenizeSNAC Edit-A-Thon on November 14, 2025. Having completed a massive renovation, we are all excited to see the new facility and some of our SNAC members who work there!

As we are about 1 week away from the event, we have also closed online registration at this time. We are happy to report that we have roughly 45 attendees in total, and about 15 for the in-person component! Those who are attending the event will get some additional information from us via email in the upcoming days.

We opened this event to attendees who may or may not have attended SNACSchool in the past as a way to build community, offer a free workshop alternative for those attending the ASIS&T 2025 Annual Meeting, and of course, spread the word about SNAC. We will provide a recap of the event in the near future, and a more robust report-out during our State of the SNAC Cooperative annual meeting on March 11, 2026.

Spring Events

As mentioned just above, March 11, 2026 will mark the first State of the SNAC Cooperative Annual Meeting since 2023. The half day event (12-5 pm EST) is sure to be packed with updates for all of our current and prospective members. Program details will be coming at a later date as we plan and organize.

REGISTER FOR THE MARCH 11TH MEETING!

We have also selected dates for our Spring 2026 Semester of SNACSchool! Registration for these events will be open soon, and attendees may be pleased to know that we are planning to streamline and shorten the programs we offer. Save the date for the following events:

  • January 15, 2026 1-3 pm EST – Research and Reference
  • February 25, 2026 1-5 pm EST – Create and Edit
  • March 25, 2026 1-3 pm EST – Indigenous Research and Reference
  • April 22, 2026 1-5 pm EST – Indigenous Create and Edit
  • May 13, 2026 2:30-4 pm EST – Tech Workshop (topic TBD)
  • June 3, 2026 1-3 pm EST – Train the Trainer

Jobs

After some restructuring, 4 of our original 6 full-time jobs for the Mellon grant have been posted and candidates have been selected to move forward to the interview process. These positions will hopefully be filled shortly, and we look forward to making an announcement around the New Year: SNAC Developer, Project Manager, Metadata Specialist, and Post-Doc.

The other 2 original positions, the SNAC Trainer and Linked Open Data Coordinator, have been turned into consultant/contract positions. SNAC Director Jerry Simmons will take on the duties of SNAC Trainer, and Stephanie Sapienza, Digital Humanities Archivist with UMD’s MITH lab, will take on the duties of our Linked Open Data Coordinator working closely with our Technical Infrastructure Working Group (TIWG).

Technical Updates

In conjunction with UMD’s MITH lab and Center for Archival Futures (CAFe), SNAC fans were able to participate in a series of OpenRefine workshops to learn more about the software itself, how to use it, and applications for SNAC and plugins. Of particular value, TIWG Chair Maristella Feustle and our tribal consultant Veronica Pipestem will be working on a dataset from the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to prepare it for ingesting into SNAC (hopefully in time for our Edit-A-Thon!), providing a huge amount of data for SNAC to be more inclusive and accurate in descriptions of various Tribes as corporate body entities in SNAC.

These reinvigorated technical efforts and the hiring of our SNAC Developer in the near future will be crucial to further SNAC development, and are integral to the success of the #IndigenizeSNAC project!

In a conjoined effort of outreach and technical expertise, future plans for the SNAC website are also in the planning stage. The “About” section of the SNAC website was recently revamped to streamline and reorganize the information, and now efforts are shifting to making the pages and information more accessible for users with disabilities while adding and updating the information to reflect the current state of SNAC.

Revitalized Indigenous Description Group

We recently put out a call for new volunteers to join the Indigenous Description Group and held our first monthly meeting with new attendees. We are so thrilled to see new faces and to feel a new sense of energy and excitement for moving SNAC forward in our #IndigenizeSNAC journey!