4/4/24, 3:31 PMPiloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group – Descriptive Notes Page 1 of 8https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ Piloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group saadescription April 2, 2024 Inclusive Description, Section updates Inclusive Description, Indigenous collections, Indigenous representation, snac By Ia Bull, Lindsey Chapman, Ti!any Chavis, Lydia Curliss, Mik Hamilton, Diana Marsh, Worthy Martin, Jerrid Lee Miller, Veronica Pipestem, Ugoma Smoke, Amanda H Sorensen, Melissa Stoner Scholarship and practice in the archival field has shown pervasive bias in archival representation and description; colonial power and knowledge systems dominate, and many marginalized and non-white communities are underrepresented (e.g. Gilliland 2011; Jimerson 2009). For Indigenous communities, those trends were compounded by the fact that many archival documents were created and collected in the context of the assimilationist and genocidal settler-colonial project (O’Neal 2014). Furthermore, within the salvage collecting paradigm, “disappearing” Indigenous knowledge was taken and described in pursuit of preservation, while (paradoxically) collectors of that information contributed to the colonial project (Stocking 1988; Hochman 2014; Redman 2021). That snac QSearch 8Browse •Resources bIhW,VdG,1850-1918 =DetailedView RevisionHistory 1Sources Biography Activities Resources Relationships Places VdGbIhW/RedbirdSmith(1850-1918)IrrR*wasaCherokee activistintheCherokeeNationinIndianTerritory.Hehelped Society,whosemembersrevitalizedtraditionalspirituality 19thcenturytotheearly20thcenturyandavidlyopposed tsigesisanhonorificforesteemedCherokeesthathavepassed https://saadescription.wordpress.com/author/saadescription/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/inclusive-description/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/category/section-updates/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/inclusive-description/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/indigenous-collections/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/indigenous-representation/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/snac/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/ 4/4/24, 3:31 PMPiloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group – Descriptive Notes Page 2 of 8https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ knowledge extraction was then further exacerbated by processes of archival diaspora (Punzalan 2014), in which Indigenous knowledge was dispersed to archives across the globe, nested within the papers of white collectors (Anderson and Christen 2019). Archivists have recognized the need to rethink how this knowledge can be better represented, not only to heal previous harms but also to make information more accessible and usable for communities. A number of professional organizations and working groups have been developing inclusive description policies, resources, and approaches that can be leveraged in a wide range of institutional contexts. The Indigenous Description Group, founded in Spring 2023 within the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) cooperative, represents one e!ort to do this work in a pan- institutional and collaborative way. SNAC is an online platform that aggregates descriptions of people, organizations, or families who created or are subjects of archives, and which links out to descriptions of their collections across the world. SNAC addresses the challenge of dispersion across archival collections by connecting distributed historical records through a “social- document network,” and it draws on a crowdsourced co-operative model in which members of the archival community and the general public are editors through free SNACSchool training. A number of us became interested in SNAC because it o!ers structural departures from “traditional” archival description that might benefit Native and Indigenous community discovery, access, and use. These include: (1) the ability to connect disparate and geographically separated records; (2) descriptive flexibility, allowing editors to create their own authority records that fit Indigenous needs and use culturally-appropriate terminologies (as opposed to other standard authority files that require bureaucratic approval processes, or Wikipedia entries which require a certain level of “notoriety” to be approved by the Wiki community); (3) the opportunity to highlight Indigenous figures, communities, or entities represented in collections that are often hierarchically organized by or held within the collections of a white collector or creator; and (4) the possibility for Indigenous community members and allies to be editors through the cooperative model, so that people who know the content and understand its complexity and attendant ethical standards can be the ones creating and editing records. In March 2023, we launched Indigenous Description Group (IDG)–modeled after SNAC’s Enslaved Description Group (EDG)–within SNAC’s Editorial Standards Working Group. The goals of the IDG are to 1) improve accessibility to archival collections for Indigenous Tribal communities; 2) mitigate harm caused by extractive collecting processes; and 3) engage in reparative description across systems, at scale, and in an interoperable way. https://snaccooperative.org/ https://snaccooperative.org/ 4/4/24, 3:31 PMPiloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group – Descriptive Notes Page 3 of 8https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ We began our work by selecting a subset of (seemingly) achievable priorities for the 2023– 2024 year. 1. Languages The first priority identified by the IDG was to focus on Indigenous languages in SNAC and the inclusion of more Indigenous languages into the SNAC picklists of languages spoken by historical figures. Currently, SNAC draws on the MARC Code List for Languages, which became an American National Standard in 1987, and is therefore used by countless libraries and other information systems across the U.S. Initial reflection on the list within the SNAC interface by participants in Indigenous edit-a-thons highlighted the fact that the list underrepresents many Indigenous languages or only represents them within codes for language groups. We have launched a collaborative e!ort with the Library of Congress’ Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division, the LC Network Development, and MARC Standards O"ce to expedite new alpha-3 MARC codes. The MARC Standards O"ce maintains these alpha-3 language codes separately from any Library of Congress subject and classification structures, making them easier to implement. Once implemented by the Library of Congress, SNAC’s technical developers will implement them in SNAC. Currently, there is a list of 39 Indigenous languages slated for new, specific alpha-3 MARC codes. For many of the languages identified so far, there are already ISO 639-3 codes, which may help the MARC Standards O"ce to further expedite the process. Likewise, many Indigenous languages remain uncataloged or misrepresented within the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and the Library of Congress Classification System. The Library of Congress’ Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) has recently formed the Task Group for Metadata Related to Indigenous Peoples of the Americas which will identify and revise vocabularies describing Indigenous groups as alternatives to LCSH. The group has recently circulated a survey to collect data about professionals working on Indigenous metadata, and our IDG members have taken part. In addition, beginning in October 2023, we began a collaborative e!ort with the Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division and LC subject and classification specialists to research, catalog, and propose Indigenous language subject headings not yet found in the LC Subject Headings relating to languages. As soon as new language subject headings pass approval by the LC subject specialists, SNAC will implement them in the SNAC controlled vocabularies, along with thousands of other topical subject headings stored in the SNAC editing system. 2. Native American Boarding Schools The second priority identified by the IDG has been Boarding School records. This is due to the historical significance of these programs, the intergenerational impact that they have had on those that experienced them, and the nature of these projects, which involved https://www.loc.gov/marc/languages/language_code.html 4/4/24, 3:31 PMPiloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group – Descriptive Notes Page 4 of 8https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ enormous amounts of distributed documentation. Other existing projects, such as the Carlisle Digital Archive and the digital archive of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), are very much in line with the projects SNAC is doing. Additionally,  since June 2021, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland has been leading the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive e!ort to recognize the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies with the goals of addressing their intergenerational impact and shedding light on the traumas of the past. We have entered a formal collaboration with NABS to integrate the Boarding School Authority File they have developed into SNAC, which could, in turn, help to identify more relevant records for NABS. 3. Tribal Names Currently, many Tribal nations are not represented in SNAC, or are represented by many inadequate or duplicate authority records. We hope to connect a wide range of archival resources with the preferred names of the sovereign Tribal nations. As a test run for the work with NABS, SNAC has received the Tribal Nation Authority file from NABS, which includes descriptions of the nations from the tribe’s perspective. We ran an OpenRefine workshop with assistance from the Technical Standards Working Group to test implementation of the Authority File in bulk in SNAC. We may need to adapt or ask for additions of fields in the current OpenRefine plugin to facilitate this import, but we are eager to see these entities become the new basis for corporate bodies, and then to work on a merge process for other extant entries. We acknowledge that this work is only within the borders of the U.S. and also relies on the problematic federal recognition process as a starting point. We are eager to explore possibilities of integrating the culture thesaurus that is in development at the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as those developed in Canada and elsewhere; we are also hoping to work with the Technical Infrastructure Working Group to consider better subject searching in our future work. 4. Relationship Types Much of SNAC is built on Records in Contexts (RiC), the standard for archival description developed by the International Council on Archives Experts Group on Archival Description.  SNAC draws on existing standards to better focus on relating records and the entities that created, used, or are documented in them, as well as to move from a hierarchical description model, as is typical in archival description, to one more like RDF triples or graph technologies that rely on nodes (entities) interconnected by arcs (relations), which would enable querying relationships and navigating among them. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/ https://boardingschoolhealing.org/resource-database-center/ https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/secretary-haaland-announces-federal-indian-boarding-school-initiative https://americanindian.si.edu/ 4/4/24, 3:31 PMPiloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group – Descriptive Notes Page 5 of 8https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ We have been working with the SNAC Editorial Standards Working Group (under Betts Coup of Harvard Houghton Library) more broadly, but we have also been working more specifically with Dr. Bernetiae Reed and the SNAC Enslaved Description Group to further develop and modify the relationship types in SNAC. These new relationship types are being drafted and reviewed as part of an evolving controlled vocabulary, with special attention to the nuances of power imbalances in person-to-person encounters, as well as the politics around Indigenous sovereignty. The goal is to provide SNAC editors with a more in-depth and flexible list of relationship types for the most robust contextual description possible. Future Work These are just some of our initial projects to enact a wider array of cultural-technical upgrades in SNAC and other standards organizations that impact the field. There remains a lot to do beyond the priorities we have identified, such as expanding placenames, modifying RDA naming standards, and working in Indigenous languages and orthographies. In future, we aim to broaden our focus to include incorporating Indigenous thesauri, subjects, and other controlled vocabularies that are being developed by Indigenous repositories and LAM organizations. Get in touch with us at indigenizesnac@umd.edu! 4/4/24, 3:31 PMPiloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group – Descriptive Notes Page 6 of 8https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ ᎠᏴ ᎪᎳᏄ ᏓᏆᏙᎠ. ᏌᎶᎵ ᎤᎾᏓᏢ ᏂᎦᏘᏲ ᎠᏆᎨᎵ ᎨᏟᏙᎯᏃ. ᏥᏄᏓᎴ ᏥᏎᎩᏳᏍᏗ ᏥᎦᏚᏩᎩᏃ ᏥᎾᏥᏃ. Ia Bull (ᎦᏚᏩᎩ/Gaduwagi) is a second-year doctoral student at the University of Maryland iSchool PhD in Information. They have an M.L.I.S. & Archives Certificate from the University of Oklahoma and a B.A. in Cherokee Language Revitalization from Northeastern State University. Their work concerns evaluating information disciplines and academia more broadly for Indigenous self-determination through language and cultural revitalization e!orts. They are currently the research assistant on the Indigenize SNAC project. Lindsay Chapman, MLIS, Bachelors in History (Pawnee/Cherokee) is a Digital Archivist working for the Cherokee Nation. Ti!any N. Chavis, MSW, MLIS (Lumbee) is an Outreach and Education Librarian for the Network of the National Library of Medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Ti!any N. Chavis Mik Hamilton Jerrid Lee Miller Amanda H Sorensen Ia Bull Diana Marsh Ugoma Smoke 4/4/24, 3:31 PMPiloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group – Descriptive Notes Page 7 of 8https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ and also works on archival projects focusing on Indigenous identity and description at other area universities (University of Maryland & University of Maryland, Baltimore County). Before making a career transition to libraries and archives, Ti!any practiced as a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW-C) with a focus on mental health and underserved populations. Lydia Curliss (Nipmuc) is a PhD student at the University of Maryland, College park in the College of Information Studies. Her research focuses on the lifecycles of Indigenous Knowledges in di!erent Cultural Heritage Institutional Settings. Critiquing these hegemonic systems that support and reify white settler colonial knowledge in these spaces, she is approaching this project from an Indigenous framework to understand and create greater space and access for Indigenous communities in Cultural Heritage spaces. Mik Hamilton is a graduate student at Simmons University studying Archives Management (MS) and History (MA). Mik is currently working as a Digital Asset Management Assistant at Harvard Law School and a Reference Assistant at O’Neill Library at Boston College. She has over seven years of work experience in the cultural heritage field, and is committed to implementing reparative description, facilitating repatriation, and improving transparency and accessibility within archives and museums. Diana Marsh is an Assistant Professor of Archives and Digital Curation at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (iSchool) and current member of the Society of American Archivists’ new Archival Repatriation Committee. Her current work focuses on improving discovery of Native and Indigenous collections held in colonial repositories and broader ethical stewardship across the archival field. Worthy Martin is an emeritus professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia and former director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities where he has been a longtime supporter of SNAC. He currently works with Indigenous communities in the southwest to engage communities and removed archaeological artifacts. Jerrid Lee Miller is a Cherokee Nation citizen, US Army veteran and the current Language Archivist for the Cherokee Nation Language Department. He is working in tandem with both the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in developing a shared digital repository that will focus on language preservation and revitalization e!orts for their shared digital materials. Veronica Pipestem (Otoe-Missouria/Osage headright holder) is the owner of ItsimiVee 4/4/24, 3:31 PMPiloting Reparative Description and Metadata in SNAC via the Indigenous Description Group – Descriptive Notes Page 8 of 8https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ LLC, a cultural program consulting services company. Ms. Pipestem has worked in cultural programs and museums in multiple roles for over 15 years. Ugoma Smoke has a Masters in Library and Information Science, specializing in Archives, Special Collections, and Museum Studies from Kent State University. She also has a Bachelors degree in Art History, with a focus on Cultural Anthropology, from the University of Akron. With over seven years of experience in libraries and as a metadata specialist, Ugoma has acquired skills in preserving archives, managing collections, digitizing materials, and writing grants. Her goal is to provide easy access, discovery, and learning opportunities to a diverse range of users and stakeholders in the library and online education industries. Amanda H Sorensen is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies. Broadly, Amanda’s research focuses on cultural heritage databases, museum information systems, and curatorial and material culture studies. She holds an MA in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia. Prior to beginning her PhD, Amanda worked as an Anne Ray Intern at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM (2019-2020), and completed a graduate fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in 2019. Melissa Stoner, a citizen of the Navajo (Diné) Nation. Currently the Native American Studies Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, Melissa brings a wealth of expertise in the arrangement, description, and digitization practices of Indigenous and ethnographic materials, particularly those containing culturally sensitive information and restricted tribal knowledge. As the current Chair of the Society of American Archivists Native American Archives Section she is actively involved in the Indigenization of the library and archive field. saadescription April 2, 2024 Inclusive Description, Section updates Inclusive Description, Indigenous collections, Indigenous representation, snac Leave a comment Descriptive Notes, https://saadescription.wordpress.com/author/saadescription/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/piloting-reparative-description-and-metadata-in-snac-via-the-indigenous-description-group/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/inclusive-description/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/category/section-updates/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/inclusive-description/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/indigenous-collections/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/indigenous-representation/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/tag/snac/ https://saadescription.wordpress.com/ https://wordpress.com/?ref=footer_custom_svg