Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure
The University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities (IATH) and the Simmons College Graduate School of Library
and Information Science are pleased to announce funding of Building a
National Archival Authorities Infrastructure by the Institute for
Museum and Library Services. Daniel Pitti (IATH) is director and
Katherine Wisser (Simmons College) is co-director of this two-year
initiative that will begin in October 2011.
Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure will engage in
two activities that are intended to lead to the realization of a long-
held desire of the American archival community: the implementation of
archival authority control and description. The first activity will
be devoted to increasing the archival community’s expertise in the use
of the recently released Encoded Archival Context–Corporate Bodies,
Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF), the international encoding standard
for archival authority control. The second activity will focus on a
community-based exploration of the essential requirements for
establishing a sustainable National Archival Authorities Cooperative
(NAAC).
SAA EAC-CPF Workshops and Scholarships
To increase community understanding of and expertise in archival
authority control, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) will offer
seven regional professional training workshops in the use and
implementation of EAC-CPF. Simmons College will offer twenty
competitively awarded scholarships for each of the seven regional
workshops, with a total of 140 scholarships to be awarded.
Katherine Wisser (Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Archives/
History Dual Degree Program at Simmons; and co-chair of the SAA TS-
EAC) will administer the scholarship program and teach the seven
regional workshops. The workshops are tentatively scheduled to begin
in March of 2012 and end in the summer of 2013.
As the workshops are scheduled, SAA will make announcements on this
and other lists. SAA will also post instructions on applying for the
scholarships. Those interested in participating in the workshops
should consult the SAA Continuing Education Calendar (http://saa.archivists.org
).
A National Archival Authorities Cooperative
In the spring of 2012, the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) will host a meeting of leaders in the archive,
library, museum, scholarly, and funding communities to explore the
feasibility of and essential business, governance, and technological
requirements for establishing a sustainable National Archival
Authorities Cooperative (NAAC). IATH will organize this meeting in
collaboration with NARA. The purpose of this meeting will be to build
support for NAAC, and to develop a rough consensus on the way forward.
Following this meeting, a small team of experts will focus on
analyzing and developing the requirements for NAAC. While much of the
work of the team of experts will be conducted via conference calls and
email, the team will have two face-to-face meetings to review and
develop the ideas that emerge into a blueprint for a national
cooperative authorities program. This will be published as a white
paper documenting the essential steps towards establishing a
professional cooperative that can provide unprecedented integrated
access to archival records held in government, business, and research
archives in the United States and access to the social and
professional networks within which the people documented in those
records lived and worked.
The goal of Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure is
to promulgate the use of EAC-CPF by increasing community awareness of
its benefits and development of the professional skills necessary to
employ it; and to lay the groundwork for establishing NAAC, so as to
enable the professional community to build collaboratively an
historical resource that will provide integrated access to and context
for understanding the American record.
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