It’s not often that one sits in a room and feels that
history is being made.
But back in
May I had the tingly history-is-happening-here feeling.
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David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States,
introduces Daniel Pitti,
seated, and launches the
National Archival Authorities Cooperative
meeting.
May 21, 2012. |
|
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The occasion was a meeting
at the National Archive organized by archivist Daniel Pitti and his
collaborators on the
SNAC project. Its purpose: to establish
the critical mass to develop a
National Archival Authorities Cooperative (NAAC)
– a professional group to develop and maintain what librarians and archivists
call “controlled vocabularies.” NAAC aims to develop an archival authorities infrastructure, or authoritative records, for
archives in the United States and abroad.
On the face of it, this may not seem like a
history-makin’ moment. In fact,
for most people, it might elicit a long, refreshing yawn. But stay with me here a moment.
Controlled vocabularies are the standard names that have
long allowed researchers to look up someone or something in a card catalog and
have a reasonably good chance of finding relevant materials. They also serve to
provide the historical context, for example, information such as a birth date
that allows for disambiguation. With authoritative records, you can be
sure that the John Muir you’re looking up was the grandfather of the American
environmental movement, rather than the fellow who published a Volkswagen
repair manual (to use an example provided by SNAC collaborator Ray Larson in
his talk).
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Ray Larson, University of California Berkeley,
describes the role of archival authorities in
disambiguating names. |
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So what would happen if there were uniform names for the
folks in all the archival records in the United States?
You’d be able to see how everyone (or
at least everyone who’s recorded in an archival record) is connected to
everyone else. Many projects, from
SNAC to
The Crowded Page, to
Linked Jazz,
and
Yaddo Circles are all working toward creating the maps (and underlying data
structures) that will help us visualize the intricate links in various communities.
Then – to paraphrase John Muir (the environmentalist, not the
Volkswagen repair guru)
– when we pick out one person by themselves we'll find them hitched to everyone else in the universe.
