Archival Authority Records and the Potential of Human-centered Archival Description
ABSTRACT
This article offers a case study in using archival authority records in Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) to gain new and useful insights into the unique characteristics of a collection, particularly as collections offer tangible evidence of the social networks of their creators. The ways in which the social networks of different corporate bodies, persons, and families differ when systematically expressed may be generalized to some extent based on profession or field. The networks themselves situate a collection's subjects in the context of a wider community, opening avenues for further inquiry. Insights from these networks have implications for reconsidering historical narratives in art and music and for interrogating the status quo regarding commonly accepted canons of works and creators in light of new contextual information.
In this study, the collection of Berthe and Adolfo Odnoposoff, together with their authority records and those of three relatives in SNAC, sheds light on the dynamics of a community of highly skilled musicians brought together by successive waves of geopolitical upheaval. Musical works arising from that community, particularly those written for the Odnoposoffs, show potential as a counterbalance to well-worn canons of commonly performed pieces, providing opportunities for performance as well as analysis and original research. Having demonstrated their benefits, the article concludes with recommendations for encouraging the wider use of archival authority records, including those prescribed by Part II of Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS).
In practice, the description of materials in archival collections generally takes precedence over the description of the human agents whose activities a collection traces. These priorities arise both from the evolution of our present descriptive standards and from realities of finite resources. Both Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) and the two predominant encoded archival standards,1 Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Encoded Archival Context—Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF), recapitulate the organization of General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD[G])2 and International Standard Archival Authority Record—Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (ISAAR-CPF),3 but the description of materials demonstrably outpaces that of human agents, and training in the description of materials lags behind that of training in archival authority records. While an endemic scarcity of time and labor and the need to control costs also affect decision-making, the status quo is not without opportunity costs of its own.
Of course, it is not that the material and contextual tasks oppose each other; rather, they are complementary, as the act of processing collections is the main occasion for the discovery of contextual information on their creators and contributors. This complementarity points to a potential shift in priorities that an archival practitioner may select in processing collections: an intensified focus on the human context of the activity that generates archival materials promises enhanced service to users of archival collections—both internal practitioners and visiting users— and closer adherence to the current DACS principles. Of particular note is the principles’ emphasis on user-centeredness as a core value and the identification of “records, agents, activities, and the relationships between them” as the scope of archival description.4
One may generalize that the first major iteration of DACS's principles focused primarily on what is in archival collections.5 With questions of “what” more settled, the revised statement of principles then moved on to why, dealing with philosophical and ethical concerns in greater depth.6 It is time for archival description to realize its fuller potential regarding the question of who is represented in our collections. This focus allows renewed consideration of how the particular interactions and relationships within a community, organization, or field of study distinguish a collection as much as the materials themselves. Even when an archival collection is “about” an individual, it reflects the tangible imprint of a community, as a unique assemblage of connections between people.
Accordingly, as a case study, the Berthe and Adolfo Odnoposoff Collection7 at the University of North Texas Music Library provides insights and benefits of having an intentional focus on human relationships, because this archival collection traces the implications for historiography and canonicity in twentieth-century musical activity in the Western Hemisphere. This study employed the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) project as a vehicle for structuring and storing data on the interpersonal networks of the Odnoposoffs, and the conclusions it generated broadly demonstrate the potential of a thriving ecosystem of archival authority records.
Literature Review
The literature that informs this inquiry falls into three categories. First, literature concerning the development of modern archival description both provides background for and points to unfinished business in the ongoing issues that successive standards seek to address. Second, resources from social network analysis offer tools for articulating differences in the nature of particular social networks that may arise from differing occupations and activities. Third, recent reports and documents concerning the state of the archival profession, practices in archival description, and proposals for new developments in the conceptual and technical aspects of description situate this article's recommendations within current theoretical and practical realities.
In a 2015 article, Daniel Pitti, Rachael Hu, Ray Larson, Brian Tingle, and Adrian Turner described the history and progress of the SNAC project up to that time8 and included a brief history of the two-part structure of archival description that is most recognizable in ISAD(G) and ISAAR-CPF and its expressions in DACS, EAD, and EAC-CPF. They noted that even in the 1960s, practitioners had begun arguing for a decoupling of the description of collection creators from collection materials “to make the description more economical, flexible, and useful.”9
In the first such article, Peter Scott argued in 1966 for abandoning the record group as the fundamental unit of archival organization and instead “to base the physical arrangement of archives on the record series as an independent element not bound to the administrative context,”10 avoiding scenarios where keeping the two in lockstep created contrived arrangements that violated archival principles regarding provenance and respect des fonds as well as obscuring the true administrative context of the items.11 In a paper-based descriptive universe, such decoupling was practical as attempting to capture complex relationships, such as those that Scott illustrated with examples of Australian government agencies and their successors, could reach a point of diminishing returns in the proliferation of paper, time and labor demands, and the usability of unwieldy description.
Fourteen years later, Richard Lytle discussed principles underlying prospective information retrieval systems for archival description, identifying two main approaches that he labeled “P” (for provenance) and “CI” (for content indexing).12 He noted that the latter approach “historically … has emphasized a rather narrow item-focus, to the virtual exclusion of provenance-related information,”13 but that these two dimensions of archival searching could be applied complementarily in varying degrees of emphasis.14
Richard Szary further observed that the “bibliographic approach” to archival description had strengthened in the intervening decades. He noted that where “traditional archival bibliographic description” includes contextual information, “it is generally found entombed in narrative passages where it is unavailable for effective searching in any kind of structured fashion.”15
To the extent that archival authority records have lagged behind material description, the lack of structured contextual information continues to pose opportunity costs for users’ ability to find, identify, select, and obtain archival materials that would be of interest to them.16 While DACS 2.6 and 2.7 provide a space for some information on provenance and context, they are not designed to replace or function as authority records, and reliance on these elements alone results in the limited and unstructured scenario that Szary describes.
In the second area of literature, recent research outputs confirm the dominance of the “bibliographic approach,” as Szary described it. The 2020–2022 grant for the Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN) project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), “a two-year research and demonstration project to build the foundation for a national archival finding aid network to address the inconsistency and inequity of the current archival discovery landscape.”17 In its focus on current archival discovery, NAFAN confirms that present practice emphasizes the description of materials. As NAFAN aggregated and studied the use of EAD, it captured the existing prioritization of materials and the general omission of archival authority records from workflows that otherwise produce the most connected and discoverable description cross-posted to various consortia and aggregators.
The International Council on Archives’ Expert Group on Archival Description (EGAD) does take notice of the uneven implementation of international archival standards in its documentation for the conceptual model (CM) underlying its Records in Contexts (RiC) project, with the most recent version released at the end of 2023.18 In particular, RiC-CM acknowledges:
Though ISAD(G) has significantly influenced international archival descriptive practice, ISAAR(CPF) has some use, and both ISDF and ISDIAH very little. The fonds-down hierarchical description prescribed by ISAD(G) remains and is likely to remain, for a variety of reasons, the prevailing approach to archival description for the near future: it addresses the traditional understanding of the Principle of Provenance; it is well understood by the community; a variety of existing methods and systems exist to facilitate creation, maintenance, and publication; and finally, it is a relatively economic approach to an exceptionally complex, labour-intensive challenge.19
RiC-CM also observes that, despite the reasons for its predominance, the “fonds-down” approach to description is not as equipped to capture and structure context within a given collection and the broader context in which the collection exists. It notes that “a fonds may be accumulated by a person or group, but the individual records in the fonds are highly likely to be of mixed provenance”20 and that “in a multidimensional approach to description, the records and record set(s), their interrelations with one another, their interrelations with persons, groups, and activities, and each of these with one another, are represented as a network within which an individual fonds may be situated.”21
One additional recent project provides data on conditions within the archival profession. Results of the A*CENSUS II surveys of archivists in late 2021 and archival administrators in early 2022 put assessments of existing archival practice in the broader reality of working conditions, including the prevalence of burnout (second only to retirement) as a reason for archivists’ exiting the profession.22 Respondents reported that the COVID-19 pandemic led to cuts in operations and personnel from which the profession had not recovered, and for administrators, lack of staff surpassed the lack of financial resources among “primary constraints on your ability to execute strategy” and even surpassed the need for collection storage space as a top overall challenge.23 Assessments of current practice and proposals for new initiatives in the United States must take into consideration the day-to-day operating conditions of archival repositories.
The third area of relevant literature for the present discussion is that of social network analysis in articulating observations about how social networks differ among creators of collections who represent different occupations and social structures. In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell categorizes humans in a social environment as connectors (those who facilitate connections between people), mavens (those who help others make informed decisions), and salesmen (those who are persuasive in influencing other people's decisions).24 The role of connector can be largely invisible, to the extent that a connector may not be the main subject of a collection, but identifying a frequently appearing connector may add crucial context to the activities of a given community. Even if a connector is not actively introducing people to one another, they may serve as common hubs of association that link a wide array of person-alities—for example, Kevin Bacon, as it were, from whom everyone seems to be within six degrees of contact.
For the discussion of technical aspects of social networks, Charles Kadushin's Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings25 provides a useful overview of the field, its concepts, and its terminology and highlights the influential literature within the discipline. Two particularly useful articles are Mark Granovetter's 1973 “The Strength of Weak Ties”26 and the 1982 publication of a preceding version from 1969, “Alienation Reconsidered: The Strength of Weak Ties.”27 Both pieces examine the dynamic of weak ties within a network and the benefits they offer despite the lack of a close relationship.
Linton C. Freeman's pioneering work on betweenness centrality also informs later discussions.28 Centrality aims to articulate, by various means, the significance of a person in a social network, while betweenness centrality in particular is concerned with the number of other members one can get to in a network via a given member,29 similar to the agent Gladwell labels as a connector.
The functions of SNAC represent an intersection between the interests of social network analysis, linked data, and the particular descriptive needs of archival practice regarding corporate bodies, persons, and families. SNAC's stated purpose is that of a discovery tool;30 among other features, the interface offers a list of same-as relationships from such identification sources as the Library of Congress's database LCNAF, Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), Wikidata, and others; a list of known archival collections where a person is a creator, contributor, or referenced; and a visualization of first-, second-, and third-degree relationships.
What Might Distinguish the Networks of Musicians?
When considering how archival collections concerned with music and musicians might differ from their nonmusical counterparts, past discussions have focused on the demands of describing the nontext medium of notated music or the variety of media potentially present in a music-related collection. One proverbial stone left largely unturned thus far is the nature of the interpersonal networks of musicians.
The Odnoposoffs and Their Network
If a visitor walked up to the library service desk and asked why Berthe and Adolfo Odnoposoff were “important,” the short answer would be that they knew and worked with the distinguished Catalan and Puerto Rican cellist Pablo Casals. It is noteworthy that even the short answer to this question about their significance has to do with an interpersonal relationship. Of course, this principal “claim to fame” is but the tip of the iceberg in the story of two fascinating lives. As the known network of their connections grows, an image emerges of a lively creative community assembled from a confluence of geopolitical circumstances.
Berthe Odnoposoff (1925–2019) was born Berthe Huberman in the Twelfth Arrondissement of Paris to parents who had emigrated from Poland.31 The distinguished violinist Bronisław Huberman was her first cousin, once removed; the 2012 documentary The Return of the Violin tells his story, and the contemporary American violinist Joshua Bell is the current owner of his former violin.32 Early in her life, Berthe's family relocated again to Havana, Cuba. There, she studied piano with Joaquín Nin33 (a former student of Moritz Moszkowski34), and she earned two diplomas in piano and in music theory and harmony from the Cuban Ministry of Education. She met her future husband, Adolfo Odnoposoff in 1944, when he performed with the Havana Symphony Orchestra as principal cellist, and they were married in 1946. They performed extensively as a piano-cello duo, and they had numerous works composed for them; the couple relocated to Mexico in the late 1950s due to political instability in Cuba, and in 1964, they moved to Puerto Rico at the invitation of Pablo Casals. After Casals's death in 1973, they joined the faculty of North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in Denton, Texas, where they spent the remainder of their careers. Berthe lived the last two years of her life near her daughter and died in Lake Success, New York, on July 1, 2019.35
Adolfo Odnoposoff (1917–1992) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a family of considerable musical ability. His older brother, violinist Ricardo Odnoposoff (1914–2004), is the best known of the siblings, who also included pianist Nélida Odnoposoff (born 1919). The family moved to Berlin around 1930 (the year of a coup d’état in Argentina, though it is unclear if the events are definitively linked), and all three studied music there.36 The following is a brief chronicle of their careers and major connections.
Ricardo Odnoposoff studied violin with Carl Flesch and composition with Paul Hindemith. In 1933, he became concertmaster of the Vienna State Opera until September 1, 1938, when Nazi discrimination after the Anschluss forced him out of the position due to lack of “Aryan” certification. Ricardo moved to Argentina and then to the United States, where he resumed his distinguished career.37
Nélida Odnoposoff studied piano in Argentina with Edmundo Piazzini and in Berlin with Hansi Freudberg, making her debut as a performer in Berlin in 1935. She also relocated to Argentina as conditions deteriorated with the approach of the Second World War. After departing Germany, Nélida continued performing actively in South America, Cuba, and Central America into the 1950s, accompanying dancer Aline Gorska along with the pianist Enrique Barenboim (father of pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim).38 Research inquiries into her life after that point have thus far been mostly unfruitful.
Adolfo, for his part, studied cello with Alberto Schiuma,39 Paul Grümmer, and Emanuel Feuermann in Berlin, and with Diran Alexanian in Paris.40 As Nazism took hold in Germany and beyond its borders, he did not relocate to South America, but to Tel Aviv under the British Mandate for Palestine as one of many Jewish musicians displaced from orchestras in Europe. He was a founding member of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra,41 which debuted in 1936 with Arturo Toscanini conducting. The principal founder of the orchestra was the aforementioned Bronisław Huberman, the first cousin of his future wife, Berthe.42
Perhaps encouraged by the relocation of much of his family to South America, Adolfo himself returned to the continent in 1938, playing first with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Perú,43 which itself consisted in large part of Jewish musicians displaced from Europe, under founding conductor Theo Buchwald.44 He then joined the Cuarteto de Cuerdas Chile45 until 1944, when he moved to Cuba. As noted previously, he and Berthe Huberman married in 1946 and remained in Cuba until political turmoil compelled their departure in the late 1950s.46 Adolfo died in Denton, Texas, on March 13, 1992.47
SNAC-informed Processing
In April 2017, the University of North Texas (UNT) Music Library acquired the Odnoposoffs’ collection of personal papers, music scores, correspondence, live recordings, photographs, and other materials as a gift. Dr. Steven Harlos, chair of the Division of Keyboard Studies of the UNT College of Music, emailed Dr. Mark McKnight, head music librarian from 2013 through 2019, to let him know that Berthe Odnoposoff had moved out of Denton to assisted living closer to her daughter and son-in-law. Her daughter, Alina, had informed Harlos that they had set a date to clear the house where Berthe had lived and wanted to donate her papers, and particularly her notated music materials, to the Music Library. McKnight oversaw the completion of this transaction and forwarded the relevant correspondence to the author. The Music Library received seven boxes, and the papers include a comprehensive run of performance programs and scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and performance reviews from the 1930s onward.48
The collection thus serves as an autobiographical record of the Odnoposoffs’ individual and shared networks, which processing and description have uncovered. The processing of this collection took place primarily in 2021, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and finished in early May 2022. While the pandemic put physical collection processing on hold, the necessity of remote work from March 2020 to March 2021 afforded the author the opportunity to create SNAC records for the collection creators in the Music Library's 140 special collections, following virtual SNAC School training in the use of the system. All components of the SNAC project and collection processing occurred in the regular workflow of the author, a salaried, full-time librarian-archivist, as established in the individual workload agreements set at the beginning of each fiscal year. Ultimately, the local SNAC project resulted in the author's creation or expansion of 130 records in that first year, with a handful of creators lacking sufficient information to identify or disambiguate them at that time. From this broader effort, the Odnoposoffs emerged as a particularly effective illustration of the potential of archival authority records to tell a more complete story than existing narratives offer.
Thus, the SNAC component of the project, begun in August 2020, was well underway when pandemic conditions (and the availability of vaccines) allowed the processing of the Odnoposoff collection to begin in the spring of 2021, and its emphasis on names and connections shaped priorities in describing the collection as an informal “pilot” project in SNAC-informed description.
As with many archival projects, the workflow for the local SNAC project and eventual processing of the Odnoposoff collection was necessarily iterative, with additions to the SNAC records as processing yielded new connections to document. The project included the creation of SNAC records for Nélida49 and Berthe50 Odnoposoff; the enhancement of records for Pablo Casals,51 Bronisław Huberman,52 and Adolfo53 and Ricardo Odnoposoff;54 and the merger of duplicate records as appropriate.
More broadly, creating or enhancing well over 200 SNAC records in the course of collection processing and other projects has altered the author's approach to processing collections. The workflow for the acquisition of a new collection in the UNT Music Library now includes the creation of a SNAC record along with the collection-level record. If a SNAC record exists, it is edited to include the presence of the newly acquired collection, and duplicate records that are identifiable as being for the same person, corporate body, or family are merged. Processing then occurs while bearing in mind and recording SNAC-oriented data in the form of personal associations (e.g., familial relationships, correspondence, organizational affiliations, professional collaborations) while creating the finding aid, so that it may, in turn, inform the expansion of the SNAC constellation.
Findings
The Odnoposoffs’ networks are a unique product of the nature of their careers as musicians, coupled with geopolitical turmoil motivating waves of relocation, beginning with pogroms in Europe such as those that forced Berthe's family to relocate from Radom, Poland, to Paris, France.55
Adolfo and Berthe Odnoposoff both individually and collectively built extensive personal networks across continents and oceans. These networks consisted of relatives who were themselves prominent musicians, their teachers, fellow musicians in large and small ensembles, the social communities that develop around music “scenes,” university colleagues, and students. An additional distinction in the Odnoposoffs’ social network is the considerable number of composers who wrote works for the couple, including Aurelio de la Vega (Cuba), Paul Csonka (Austria), Rodolfo Halffter (Mexico), Roque Cordero (Panama), Martin Mailman (United States), and Héctor Campos Parsi (Puerto Rico).56
One may conjecture that some characteristics of the Odnoposoffs’ social networks are generalizable for a diverse assortment of musicians. Such networks are characterized by a particularly large number of weak ties via associations with ensemble or bandmates, audience members, and “fans,” as well as proximate connections to major figures. Connections to major figures might arise through a lineage of teachers and their teachers. Alternatively, the sheer number of weak ties raises the odds that some contacts are associated with prominent figures and/or have remarkably large personal networks. The resulting networks are low in density (the number of actual connections divided by the number of possible connections57) but far-reaching.
These interpersonal associations of musicians are distinct from those likely to characterize other occupations, where the reasons and settings for proximity (i.e., propinquity, per Kadushin58) vary, as does the nature of homophily (the likelihood of people with similar characteristics to connect59), and the nature of the simultaneous connections that constitute multiplexity.60
Figure 1 shows a visualization of the first-degree connections of Adolfo, Ricardo, and Nélida Odnoposoff, along with Berthe Odnoposoff and Bronisław Huberman. SNAC allows the export of the EAC-CPF XML files associated with individual records; the author used OpenRefine to convert the XML files to tabular data (allowing export as Excel files, among other formats). Columns with data types corresponding to those used in the Gephi data visualization program were converted into a comma separated value (CSV) file for import into Gephi version 0.9.2. Gephi is a complex program whose full description is beyond the scope of this article, but for this project, these columns consisted of “Source,” “Target” (or, respectively, Person 1, who is somehow related to Person 2), “Type of connection” (the default option61 of Directed, as opposed to Undirected or Mixed, sufficed for this demonstration), and “Kind of connection.” Labels for the “Kind of connection” column were taken from options used within the SNAC record, such as “associated-With,” “employeeOf,” and so on, so that the data were structured for later use even if the following grayscale example does not illustrate those associations as plainly as they could be in a different setting.
Citation: The American Archivist 87, 2; 10.17723/2327-9702-87.2.387
Notably, Berthe and Adolfo are not the most extensively connected figures, even within their own family. Their networks are, however, the vehicle for discovering this broader network in the first place, which recalls Gladwell's category of connectors, along with demonstrating betweenness centrality, whereby “The person that serves as a connector or switching point can be very important, above and beyond their ‘popularity.’”62
SNAC-informed, human-centered description thus expands a one-dimensional characterization—that Berthe and Adolfo Odnoposoff were associated with Pablo Casals—to the reconstruction of a complex community of associations. Like a longer photographic exposure of a night sky, what may have appeared in a snapshot to be the vacuum of space is instead filled with lights of varying intensity, inviting the eye to pick out patterns and groupings. In this regard, it is especially appropriate that SNAC terms the network of a given individual as a “constellation.”
These findings demonstrate an enhanced potential for research and discovery using archival authority records and their augmented power as structured and linked data: one can imagine the discoveries that would be possible if such data were available as a matter of routine, as online finding aids are now available in a way one could only dream of thirty years ago.
Two especially useful applications of such information arise in the related areas of historiography and canonicity. Historiography, the critical examination of historical narratives,63 strives to offer a more complete picture of social phenomena obscured and distorted by the lens of time, particularly as a counterbalance to the “great man theory,”64 which would craft narratives around singular figures to the exclusion of their cultural and social contexts. Yes, the Odnoposoffs worked and socialized with Pablo Casals, but centering the narrative on Casals misses multiple stories worth telling in the lives of the Odnoposoffs and their relatives. Many other such stories are surely waiting to be told in other collections.
Issues of canonicity—the condition of meriting “canonical” status65—are fellow travelers with the complications of the “great man theory”: if only a few singular “greats” matter, the authoritative list of “important” works of art, music, writing, and so on is similarly narrow. In music, for example, one hears of the “Three Bs,” or Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. A typical canon of “important” composers would also admit Haydn and Mozart to the top tier; this canon of composers continues to dominate concert programming and core repertory. The Odnoposoffs’ network shows, tangibly, the parallel reality of creative activity to which the narrow musical canon is oblivious. A substantive first step in a rebalanced approach to the canon66 of “art music” and performance of a wider repertory is having a set of names of composers and performers to investigate, and in this regard, archival authority records can go a long way toward fulfilling the librarian S. R. Ranganathan's fourth law: saving the time of the user.
Challenges
SNAC
Resources need not be perfect before they are useful. As archival description is a dynamic, iterative process,67 so is the development of archival tools and resources, and the use of the tools enables their improvement. The present study demonstrates the utility of SNAC even as this section acknowledges some limitations in the system.
The data in SNAC are a combination of mass imports and user-created records.68 Many duplicate records require merging when there is enough information in a given record for positive identification of a corporate body, person, or family. It is possible to label uncertain matches as “maybe same,” but even arriving at that level may require time-consuming research and successive contacts with the repositories whose collections are associated with a record. Collections where a person is referenced but is not a central figure may not provide enough information to disambiguate like names.
Of necessity, not all of an agent's connections will appear in SNAC, as the fundamental criterion for inclusion in SNAC is being named in an archival collection.69 On the other hand, within the system, while gaps will always remain, some constellations are so prolific as to overshadow more relevant information. In music-related constellations, Nicolas Slonimsky and Serge Koussevitzky's prolific correspondence allowed for the import of many unique identities into the system, but as the system currently stands, they sometimes have an outsized presence in network visualizations of the second degree. Of course, the ideal solution for this situation would be for new additions of constellations and connections to the system to proliferate and balance out the current prominence of Slonimsky's and Koussevitzky's connections.
Even within individual records that offer an abundance of connections, one must also keep in mind that, given the iterative nature of the description of both materials and creators, a connection's absence from a constellation is not sufficient to conclude its nonexistence. Rather, a constellation exists as a snapshot in time of connections for which evidence is known to exist and that a SNAC editor has had sufficient bandwidth to document, undertaking original research as necessary. Where SNAC connections arise from physical processing and description of a collection, their depth depends, like the processing and description themselves, on available time and labor.
However, this situation does not point to an insurmountable defect; rather, it mirrors the reality not only of archival description but of research and publication in general: rarely is a topic entirely, definitively “done,” but rather, every new addition advances an ongoing conversation. In this regard, hearing the late-night infomercial refrain “But wait, there's more” is not cause for discouragement but for hope in new and enlightening discoveries to come.
DACS
As a content standard, DACS is concerned with content rather than designating a home for that content. However, DACS's Principle 8 provides flexibility in description “that can be expressed in a variety of useful outputs,” while noting that ideal outputs are discoverable, structured, machine-readable, machine-actionable, and available under an open license.70 Principle 8 thus describes what archival authority records need for broader implementation and use. SNAC has best fulfilled these tenets so far, although it is not a direct outgrowth of DACS. ArchivesSpace, the predominant archival management system within the United States, also allows structuring creator information, though establishing the wider adoption of available tools remains the central challenge.
Time, Labor, Innovation, and Progress
Acknowledgment of the limitations of systems and standards is incomplete without acknowledgment of the challenges facing the people who use them. As discussion of EAD3 pivots to EAD4, and as RiC's Conceptual Model and Ontology chart a path forward for changes in archival description and systems, one question remains: if one agrees that archival authority records merit wider implementation and use, what does change look like in a profession whose members often already function in perpetual overdrive?
Recommendations
Recalling the A*CENSUS II finding that identified lack of staffing as first among the “primary constraints on [one's] ability to execute strategy,”71 advocacy for sufficient staffing and employee retention must precede and accompany advocacy for changes in archival practice.
Within that context, this article's main recommendation is, of course, the expanded use of archival authority records. While RiC-CM offers a path forward for incorporating archival authority records and other underimplemented components into archival description, the document emphasizes that “RIC-CM is only intended to provide a framework for standardizing the inputs into the system and leave the rendering of outputs and user interfaces unconstrained by rules that might unwittingly hamper efforts aimed at innovation and experimentation.”72 Therefore, what such implementation ultimately looks like will depend on input from a variety of stakeholders.
In addition, as training and implementation of archival authority records lag in the workplace, they merit more coverage in the academic training of aspiring archivists in library and information science programs. Given that such programs are usually predominantly geared toward libraries and that archives often exist within library systems, it is not surprising that a “cataloging” mindset influences the treatment of archival description. There is, however, an opportunity for reciprocal influence and, hopefully, mutual enrichment through a stronger presence of archival practice in describing persons, corporate bodies, and families as well as materials.
Conclusion
This article has sought to demonstrate how attention to archival authority records leads to new and useful insights about the unique characteristics of a collection, particularly regarding the nature of the social networks its contents outline. In addition, those insights have implications for historiographical inquiry and canonicity. The collection of Berthe and Adolfo Odnoposoff, together with their authority records and those of three relatives in Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC), shed light on the dynamics of a community of highly skilled musicians brought together by successive waves of geopolitical upheaval. The study has also highlighted musical works arising from that community that may serve as a counterbalance to well-worn canons of commonly performed pieces, providing opportunities for performance as well as analysis and other original research.
Looking at a collection through a human-centered lens, rather than a materialistic one, holds great promise for increased engagement with users as well as enhanced description of the entire collection. Highlighting human activity and relating it to the materials, as DACS Principle 5 already calls for, makes clearer both the relevance and significance of a collection. In this case, it elevates the Odnoposoff collection from another set of faculty papers to the imprint of a musical community brought together under unique circumstances, raising the odds that their work will be remembered and that the music they cared about will continue to be performed and heard. Substantive steps toward addressing the challenges of time, labor, and logistics in encouraging and codifying the increased use of archival authority records include building consensus on their usefulness; acknowledging the realities of scarcity under which archival repositories function; advocating for changes in the profession to mitigate understaffing and burnout; the updating of standards, training materials, and archival curricula; and ongoing communication with and outreach to archival practitioners. These steps are, indeed, necessary with or without archival authority records, but they also open the way for their inclusion, as well as other forms of innovation that such resources make possible.
First-degree interpersonal connections of the Odnoposoff siblings (Adolfo, Ricardo, Nélida), Berthe Odnoposoff, and her cousin, Bronisław Huberman