Note: Some background material about this project is linked to at the bottom of this post.
Despite the trove of details a single email can unearth, rigorous cataloguing of email communication remains the exception, not the rule. Instead, those trying to understand the recent historical record are, too often, left feeling the way many of us do with our personal inboxes: searching in vain for that one elusive message.
That’s why The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK have organized a Task Force on Technical Approaches to Email Archives. The task force, composed of 18 members from national libraries, universities, archives, and industry, is halfway through a year-long process to assess current efforts to preserve email and develop a framework to address the challenges associated with email archives. By the end of 2017, the task force will report on its findings and recommendations for actions that archives could take in the next two to five years to safely acquire and preserve email for future research use.
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Video (Also Embedded in Blog Post)
Background
See Also: Setting the Standards for Saving Email (by Matt Enis, Library Journal)
Jan. 31, 2017.