University of Maryland

GENERAL and TEAM UPDATES: SAA, Summer-Fall SNAC Events and New Staff Announcements!

We are thrilled to bring you some exciting news—mostly a whole boatload of events for you to participate in (there’s a flyer at the end of this post for anyone wishing to circulate)!

We’re Going to SAA!

And we are so excited to experience New Orleans with all of those attending! Of course, many of our Cooperative members and #IndigenizeSNAC team members have submitted to papers and proposals to present, but we are also hopeful about snagging an information table to chat with you all about SNAC so be on the lookout for us there!

We’re also happy to announce an IN-PERSON SNACSchool event to be held on the first day of SAA (don’t worry—there are no panels or workshops that day!). We will be offering a Create and Edit module, and are very thankful to colleagues at Tulane University’s Howard Tilton Memorial Library for providing us with space and accommodations that day! There will not be a virtual component to this event, so be sure to register if you’ll be in New Orleans IN-PERSON on July 29, 2026!

Summer and Fall SNACSchool

This series is made publicly accessible by a Mellon funded grant in which a team of researchers are exploring ways to improve search and access of archival records for Indigenous communities through the SNAC platform. Through qualitative and Indigenous methodologies, we are exploring the potential for Indigenizing aggregation and linked data tools to better connect Indigenous researchers to community records.

The structure of the program has been revamped and shortened, and we have made many aspects of SNACSchool asynchronous and are hoping to develop a fully asynchronous version of SNACSchool as well.

Registration has opened for our Summer-Fall 2026 SNACSchool Events! Go to our website or click the links below to register:

Edit-A-Thon

After great success with our edit-a-thon last November in conjunction with the ASIS&T Annual Meeting, we will be holding another edit-a-thon this November! This time, the event will focus specifically on SNAC’s “merge” functions and how to do it properly and efficiently. We believe that there’s a lot of clean-up to do, especially after the ingest of a dataset from the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (watch a recap here), and we want to open the opportunity for folks to learn this special SNAC skill.

Registration for this event is not open yet, but save-the-date for November 12, 2026 and will occur in two parts.

  1. 12-1 pm EST | SNACSchool Merge: Learn the ins and outs of merging duplicate records in SNAC.
  2. 2-5 pm EST | Merge-A-Thon: Put your new skills to work in a live 3-hour edit-a-thon hosted by members of our #IndigenizeSNAC project and leaders of various working groups.

Jobs

During our State of the SNAC Cooperative 2026 event (watch on YouTube or catch the highlights) we introduced our newest full time staff members. Here are some quick bios to get to know them a bit better:

  • Adriana Cutler | Project Manager, University of Maryland, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesAdriana Cutler is the full-time Project Manager for IndigenizeSNAC. She most recently served as a Senior Program Officer in the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment for the Humanities, where her focus was on capacity building in preservation and collections management for small and mid-sized institutions, as well as outreach to underserved communities with a focus on the Latino community. Adriana has also worked at numerous cultural organizations, including The Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife, and the Museum of the Americas. She holds a Master’s in Arts Management from George Mason University and is excited to be back at the University of Maryland, where she earned her B.A. (Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Business) in the Individual Studies Program.
  • Michael Poston | SNAC Developer, University of Maryland, College of InformationMichael Poston is a computer programmer with a background in the Digital Humanities. His recent work at the Folger Shakespeare Library involved building research databases and encoding transcriptions of Early Modern texts. This project marks a return to the University of Maryland, where he earned MA (English Language and Literature) and MLS degrees.
  • Ugoma Smoke | Metadata Specialist, University of Maryland, College of Information, and Chair, SNAC Editorial Standards Working GroupUgoma Smoke (she/her/hers) is a Metadata Specialist at UMD in College Park, MD. She lives in Fayetteville, AR. Ugoma holds an MLIS degree from Kent State University with specializations in Archives and Special Collections, Museum Studies, and Digital Preservation, and a B.A. in Art History with an emphasis in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Akron. Her work focuses on metadata, Indigenous archives, and ethical description practices, and she has previous experience in genealogy and local history research in the Cherokee Nation community. She also received archival training from the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, OK. Previously, she served as a Research Assistant in Native and Indigenous Archives and Linked Data, collaborating and coordinating events with the Council of the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) and the Linking Anthropology’s Data and Archives (LADA) project. In her spare time, Ugoma enjoys creating unique ice cream flavors with her son.

We also welcome Stephanie Sapienza as our Linked Data Coordinator, Jerry Simmons as our Lead SNAC Trainer, and we will be joined by a Post-Doc later this year!

Stephanie Sapienza | Linked Data Coordinator, University of Maryland, College of Information, and Digital Humanities Archivist, University of Maryland, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Stephanie Sapienza is the Digital Humanities Archivist at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, where she works at the intersection of archives, digital curation, and linked data. Her work focuses on developing workflows that reconnect dispersed records, improve discovery, and support more meaningful access across systems and repositories. For the IndigenizeSNAC initiative, she contributes expertise in linked data, metadata transformation, and archival workflows to help build community-responsive approaches to Indigenous archival search and description.

Jerry Simmons | SNAC Director, University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and Lead SNAC Trainer, University of Maryland, College of Information

Jerry Simmons is the Director of SNAC (University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) and Lead SNACSchool Trainer, University of Maryland, College of Information. Before joining the #IndigenizeSNAC project, Jerry worked at the National Archives and Records Administration as the Team Lead for Authorities Cataloging and then NARA’s Agency Liaison to the SNAC Cooperative. He has his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Georgia and his MLIS from the Catholic University of America’s School of Library and Information Science.

A flyer with the dates for SNAC's virtual events slates for the Summer-Fall 2026 season. For dates, navigate to portal.snaccooperative.org/snacschool.