SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
EXPLORE +
  • About infoDOCKET
  • Academic Libraries on LJ
  • Research on LJ
  • News on LJ
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Libraries
    • Academic Libraries
    • Government Libraries
    • National Libraries
    • Public Libraries
  • Companies (Publishers/Vendors)
    • EBSCO
    • Elsevier
    • Ex Libris
    • Frontiers
    • Gale
    • PLOS
    • Scholastic
  • New Resources
    • Dashboards
    • Data Files
    • Digital Collections
    • Digital Preservation
    • Interactive Tools
    • Maps
    • Other
    • Podcasts
    • Productivity
  • New Research
    • Conference Presentations
    • Journal Articles
    • Lecture
    • New Issue
    • Reports
  • Topics
    • Archives & Special Collections
    • Associations & Organizations
    • Awards
    • Funding
    • Interviews
    • Jobs
    • Management & Leadership
    • News
    • Patrons & Users
    • Preservation
    • Profiles
    • Publishing
    • Roundup
    • Scholarly Communications
      • Open Access

November 1, 2016 by Gary Price

Mellon Foundation and Digital Preservation Coalition Sponsor Formation of Task Force for Email Archives

November 1, 2016 by Gary Price

News today from the Mellon Foundation and DPC.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Digital Preservation Coalition announced the formation of a Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives.  The task force is charged with assessing current frameworks, tools, and approaches being taken toward these critical historical sources.
Christopher Prom, assistant university archivist/Andrew S. G. Turyn Endowed Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Kate Murray, IT specialist in the Technology Policy Directorate at the Library of Congress, will serve as cochairs of the task force.
Personal correspondence has long served as an essential primary source for historians and scholars across many humanities and social science disciplines. Archives of correspondence articulate authors’ lived experiences. They help future generations understand and learn from history, providing evidence of the functions and activities of governments, businesses, nonprofit organizations, families, and individuals.  But today, much of that correspondence is embodied by digital materials, and particularly emails, which have proven themselves far more difficult to gather and preserve in an accessible, approachable format.

“This is a topic of deep concern.  Preserved correspondence helps students of the past develop a nuanced understanding of events, much more so than published or other widely circulated sources,” explained Prom.
While archivists, technologists, librarians, and others continue to make progress in capturing, preserving, and providing access to various forms of digital expression, email has remained resistant to a variety of efforts at preservation and is currently not systematically acquired by most archives and libraries.  Part of the challenge is that email exists as a complicated interaction of technical subsystems for composition, transport, viewing, and storage.  Creating email archives involves multiple processes including acquisition and appraisal of collections, processing records, meeting privacy and legal considerations, preserving messages and attachments, and facilitating access.
“As archives include more born-digital collections, the complex technical issues around preserving email are more prevalent and increasingly important,” said Murray. “The technical issues around email preservation are compounded by the sheer scale of the collections.  Many of us have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of email messages in our mailboxes. Solutions need to move beyond the boutique and one-off to community supported, large-scale and customizable options.”
The preservation of email thus cannot rely on a single, comprehensive solution, but on the coupling and interaction of a variety of solutions covering the entire range of archival activities, from appraising the research value of email to helping researchers discover and use it.
Recent meetings of specialists in the area of email archives have agreed that the time is right to reexamine and assess current efforts to preserve email. The community needs to articulate a conceptual and technical framework in which these efforts can operate not as competing solutions, but as elements of an interoperable toolkit. The task force will aim to construct a working agenda for the community by focusing on the following three issues: (1) articulating this technical framework, (2) suggesting how existing tools fit within this framework, and (3) beginning to identify any missing elements.
The task force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives is charged to examine these issues over the next 12 months. The task force will then prepare a report of its findings, with recommendations for specific actions that archives could take within five years to create, preserve, and provide access to records of electronic correspondence.
Participants in the task force include experts who are currently employed by Google, Microsoft, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Universities, University of Manchester (UK), the National Archives and Records Administration, Rockefeller Archive Center, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Digital Preservation Coalition, The University of Texas at Austin, University of Arizona, University of Michigan, and Artefactual Systems. They are:
Executive Committee
Christopher Prom (cochair)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kate Murray (cochair)
Library of Congress
Fran Baker
University of Manchester
Matthew Connelly
Columbia University
Wendy Gogel
Harvard Library Preservation Services
Task Force Members
Hillel Arnold
Rockefeller Archive Center
Courtney Cain
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Euan Cochrane
Yale University Library
Kevin DeVorsey
National Archives and Records Administration
Glynn Edwards
Stanford University Libraries
Riccardo Ferrante
Smithsonian Institution Archives
William Kilbride
Digital Preservation Coalition
Jessica Meyerson
The University of Texas at Austin
Erin O’Meara
University of Arizona Libraries
Michael Shallcross
University of Michigan
Joel Simpson
Artefactual Systems
Richard Whitt
Google
Julian Zbogar-Smith
Microsoft

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Associations and Organizations, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News, Preservation

SHARE:

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Job Zone

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Infodocket Posts

ADVERTISEMENT

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

Tweets by infoDOCKET

ADVERTISEMENT

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • Programs+
  • Design
  • Leadership
  • People
  • COVID-19
  • Advocacy
  • Opinion
  • INFOdocket
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Booklists
  • Prepub Alert
  • Book Pulse
  • Media
  • Readers' Advisory
  • Self-Published Books
  • Review Submissions
  • Review for LJ

Awards

  • Library of the Year
  • Librarian of the Year
  • Movers & Shakers 2022
  • Paralibrarian of the Year
  • Best Small Library
  • Marketer of the Year
  • All Awards Guidelines
  • Community Impact Prize

Resources

  • LJ Index/Star Libraries
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies

Events & PD

  • Online Courses
  • In-Person Events
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Submit Features/News
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Careers at MSI


© 2023 Library Journal. All rights reserved.


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.