Email is a chronicle of our time; its use is endemic in both organizations and in people’s personal lives. Confidential and convenient, it provides critical insight into the lives and decisions of institutions and individuals alike. To enable future scholarship and research, libraries and archives must capture, preserve, and provide access to the evidence that email holds. Yet email’s complexity has prevented many archives from approaching this work in a systematic way. Email is a complicated interaction of technical subsystems for composition, transport, viewing, and storage. Archivists and information managers must build trust with email creators who will be transferring their potentially sensitive accounts, capture collections from many locations, process the multitude of email records, meet privacy and legal considerations, preserve messages and attachments, and facilitate access. This one-day course is aimed at helping participants develop a programmatic means to understand, acquire, preserve, and provide access to born-digital correspondence.
Upon completion of this course, you'll be able to- Describe the unique properties of email and demonstrate knowledge of the effects those unique properties have on email preservation and access.
- Identify and respond to challenges (legal, technical, and staffing) associated with programs to acquire, preserve and provide access to email records.
- Become familiar with email processing tools through demonstrations and an overview of commonly used tools in the field, with a focus on their use in classifying, arranging, and describing email collections.
- Develop an email processing workflow for potential implementation in your own repository.
- Consider potential description and access practices for email in your institutions.
Who Should Attend?Repository managers, records managers, archivists, practitioners, and anyone responsible for the arrangement, description, and/or preservation of digital records. You should have basic knowledge concerning digital preservation strategies. This course builds on others in the Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) curriculum, such as Basics of Managing Digital Records.
What You Should Already KnowNo prior experience necessary.
Instructors: - Jessika Drmacich, Records Manager/Digital Resources Archivist, Williams College
- Ruby Martinez, Digital Preservation Assistant, Penn State University
