TEAM UPDATE: IndigenizeSNAC Team Members Present at CNI!

At the Fall 2025 Coalition for Networked Information meeting, held December 11-12 in Washington, D.C., IndigenizeSNAC team members Diana Marsh, Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño and Cupeño), Veronica Pipestem (Otoe-Missouria), and  Jerry Simmons and presented a briefing on the project.

Description

The briefing will share ongoing work on the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)- and more recently Mellon-funded Indigenizing Archival Search and IndigenizeSNAC projects which are evaluating SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) for inter-institutional Indigenous search and “right to know.” Through edit-a-thons, two years of work with the Indigenous Description Group, and focus group discussions, there is now clear guidance on training access, data ingest and export, and descriptive needs to improve SNAC as a tool for Indigenous data sovereignty, facilitating Native and Indigenous community access to their own archival collections and cultural heritage materials across disparate institutions. The briefing will share the concluding phase of the IMLS-funded work and launch of a new three-year Mellon-funded iteration of the project, including: 1) work to improve the SNAC OpenRefine plugin, language representation, and Tribal entities in the platform, 2) demonstrate Indigenous examples in SNAC, and 3) presentation on the progress of adopting new Indigenous thesauri, editorial standards, and partnerships with Tribal archives.

For the origin of the “right to know” see: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1051&context=westernarchives

Presenters

Diana Marsh
Assistant Professor of Archives & Digital Curation, College of Information University of Maryland, College Park

Jerry Simmons
Director, SNAC Cooperative
University of Virginia

Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño/Cupeño)
Assistant Professor
University of Maryland, College Park

Veronica Pipestem (Otoe-Missouria)
Cultural and Natural Resources Consultant