Curious about what we’ve been up to? March 11, 2026, was an exciting day for the SNAC Cooperative as we gathered virtually to share milestones, new projects, and our vision for 2026 and beyond. It’s been a while since our last cooperative-wide meeting in 2023, and as SNAC Director Jerry Simmons noted in his opening remarks, “much has happened since then.” You can watch the full recording below, or navigate to the playlist on YouTube to watch specific sections.

The Changing of the Guard: Director’s Update

The event kicked off with an opening prayer ceremony led by ᏭᏬᏪᎳᏅᎯ (Wahde “Ryan” Mackey) ᎦᎵᏍᎨᏫ, a Cherokee language specialist and enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. SNAC Director Jerry Simmons continued with welcome remarks, sending a heartfelt thank you to Daniel Pitti, SNAC’s creator and long-time director, who retired in June 2025. Jerry took over the helm in July 2025, bringing a renewed focus on “mindful, meaningful, accurate, and respectful archival description”. Today, SNAC is a massive community effort with 3.5 million identity constellations and over 540 trained editors contributing from institutions like the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress.

Operational Foundations

Since our last cooperative-wide gathering in 2023, SNAC has evolved into a structured, interactive, multi-channel operation committed to mindful, accurate, and respectful archival description. This growth is fueled by dedicated working groups that bridge the gap between our technical infrastructure, our editorial integrity, and the community we serve.

• Outreach Revitalized: Connecting the Dots The Outreach Working Group, chaired by Scotty Beland, underwent a major reactivation in June 2025 supported by vital funding from the IMLS and Mellon Foundation. To make our resources more accessible, we completed a major website overhaul, reducing the portal from over 30 pages to 5 key pages. Our social media expansion across Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube has seen engagement trends climb, particularly through campaigns during Native American Heritage Month and our “Archives 101” reels. Furthermore, SNACSchool 5.0 has become our primary vehicle for growth, with nearly 200 registrations for our recent State of the Cooperative event.
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• Editorial Standards: The Ethos of Care Led by Ugoma Smoke, the Editorial Standards Working Group (ESWG) ensures that descriptions of Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (CPF) in SNAC remain reliable and consistent. We are currently in the middle of a comprehensive policy review to identify and clarify guidelines that may need revision. These shared standards are the essential “glue” that allows over 540 trained editors from various institutions to contribute to a cohesive system.
• Technical Infrastructure: Bots, Plugins, and OpenRefine The Technical Infrastructure Working Group (TIWG), chaired by Maristella Feustle, has focused on enhancing site performance and integrating powerful new tools. We recently addressed significant site slowdowns caused by AI bots by implementing a JavaScript and cookie-based verification system. Major technical wins include use of OpenRefine to ingest a Native American Boarding School (NABS) data set (see below!) and encouraging the use of our ArchivesSpace plugin (see below!), which allows archivists to link their local collections directly to SNAC identity records.

Enslaved Description Group: Accuracy & Agency

The Enslaved Description Group (EDG) is officially “unpaused” and moving forward with urgency. Chair B. Bernetiae Reed and Ugoma Smoke highlighted significant descriptive shifts, such as replacing “ownerOf” and “ownedBy” relationships with “enslaverOf” and “enslavedBy” to provide more accurate historical context. We are also working on the Slavery Era Entities Description System (SEEDS) to create chronological biographies that reflect the full lives of enslaved persons, rather than just their status as property. As Bernetiae put it, SNAC has the potential to “knock access holes in the brick walls” faced by African American genealogical researchers.

IndigenizeSNAC: Sovereignty in the Archive

Diana Marsh and Abby Hardy (Monacan Indian Nation) shared the incredible progress of the IndigenizeSNAC project. We’ve successfully ingested tribal authority files for federally recognized nations (while fully acknowledging the limitations and challenges to this) and updated our language picklists using ISO 639-3 codes. Looking forward, the project is a part of “IndigenizeSTAR” (Systems Transforming Archival Reclamation), centering on Indigenous sovereignty and relational accountability in archival systems. We are also happy to announce or new Full Time hires to fulfill our grant missions. Huge shout outs to:

• Adriana Cutler | Project Manager
• Michael Poston | SNAC Developer
• Ugoma Smoke | Metadata Specialist

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!

NABS Data and OpenRefine: Processing at Scale

Following a successful OpenRefine demo series with UMD’s Center for Archival Futures, Veronica Pipestem (Otoe-Missouria) and Maristella Feustle walked us through the technical heavy lifting required to ingest the Native American Boarding School (NABS) data set. Manually editing these records would have been “impractically time-consuming,” so we utilized the OpenRefine plugin to parse and standardize the data. This workflow included using Unix scripts to recover website titles for citations—a “75% solution” that uncovered several dead links—and reverse geocoding coordinates into searchable place names. A follow up event is scheduled on May 13, 2026 from 2:30-4 pm EST where we will show you how to upload the data into SNAC after it has been prepared in OpenRefine.

SNAC Technical Futures: Modernizing the Stack

Lead Developer Robbie Hott gave us a look at the “bones” of SNAC, which consists of about 100,000 lines of code across a complex distributed system. While our infrastructure is robust, we’ve faced recent hurdles like Google’s authentication changes and resource-draining AI bots. To keep things running smoothly, we’ve implemented a new JavaScript and cookie-based verification system and are performing “spring cleaning” on our code repositories. Looking ahead, we’re excited about the Controlled Concepts Manager, the potential for variant name searching, and modernizing our display with Bootstrap 5.

Demo of SNAC’s Plugin for ArchivesSpace

Maristella Feustle provides a valuable walk-through of how to use SNAC’s plugin for ArchivesSpace with real examples from the University of North Texas Music Library’s collections. The recording shows how the plugin allows archivists to import and link agent records from SNAC directly into their local instances to improve name disambiguation. By situating local collections in a broader context, the plugin saves time for researchers and staff while significantly enhancing the discoverability of archival materials.

Come SNAC with us!

We are so grateful to everyone who joined us! If you missed the session or want to dive deeper, please check out the playlist at the top of this post, or email us at snac.cooperative@gmail.com. There are many ways to collaborate with us, such as joining a working group or signing up for an upcoming SNACSchool training session on March 25 or April 22.

 

 

Tags: Archives, IndigenizeSNAC, linked data, Reparative archiving, SNAC