Moving Email Archives from Theory to Practice
Channel: CNI: Coalition for Networked Information
Date: 2021-11-18

Ruby Martinez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Stephen Abrams, Harvard University
Matt Teichman, University of Chicago
Chris Prom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Letters, memos, and other forms of printed correspondence are essential primary source research records, supporting inquiry in multiple areas of human experience. The galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) community has recently made important strides in developing technologies that can, in theory, be used to foster the preservation of electronic correspondence, yet the archiving of email and other forms of digital correspondence is more often discussed than it is practiced, at a grave potential cost to public accountability and the historical record. This session seeks to bridge that gap by informing attendees of community-building efforts taking place under the umbrella of two grant-supported projects: Email Archives Building Capacity and Community and Email Archiving in PDF (EA-PDF): From Initial Specification to Community of Practice. Panelists will focus attention on A) the results of a survey of practice; B) reports from two regrant projects developing open source tools (EPADD+ and Attachment Converter) and; C) an academic/industry partnership with the PDF Association to develop a format specification for archiving emails in the widely supported PDF format. As a whole, the session will describe steps that cultural heritage managers can take to develop workflows, interoperable systems, metadata pathways, and archival packaging methods while seeking much-needed input on these community-led projects.

https://emailarchivesgrant.library.illinois.edu/blog/
https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-250129-ols-21
https://preservation.library.harvard.edu/epadd-plus
 
Learn more: https://www.cni.org/topics/special-collections/moving-email-archives-from-theory-to-practice
 
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Presented at Fall 2021 Membership Meeting
Virtual: December 7-9, 2021
In-Person: December 13-14, 2021
 
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