I have not been able to post in quite a while, since I’ve been wrapped up with other duties. But, to break the silence, here is a brief peice outlining some basic email preservation options, which I recently wrote for publication in an upcoming edition of the Midwest Archives Conference Newsletter:
The prominent Atlantic journalist and blogger James Fallows recently described how an email hacker destroyed records having great personal value: his wife’s entire Gmail archives, covering many years of her life.[1] Although Fallows’ story ended happily, with the records being recovered through insider connections at Google, it seems likely that little email correspondence is currently being saved and preserved for its historical value, for the population generally.
In a follow-up piece, Fallows noted how the email records of a prominent journalist, records likely of great historical value, were similarly lost.[2] At my own institution, one important university officer recently lost all email prior to 2010, apparently during a system migration. An important scholar with whom I’ve been in contact related a very similar story. The evidence I cite is anecdotal, but how many of our institutions are actually capturing records from email communications?
We in the archival community can and must help people save email in a way that makes it likely that email records will one day become research collections, openly accessible for their historical value. In order to do this, each institution will need to develop its own rationale for a long-term email preservation project in light of local needs, institutional profiles, mandates, and policies. Without denying the paramount importance of defining these policies, this article will provide some technical options that might be used to provide the building blocks for a set of local email preservation services, under the rubric of the two general approaches that are practicable using currently available technologies.
One of my hobby horses, which has led me to think about what a real personal digital archives service would look like, is that the terms of service for nearly every major company that provides social media, webhosting or cloud services do little or nothing to protect an individual’s content, leaving it more or less at the mercy of the service provider. And even if groups do the right thing and try to get people to migrate over, many people fail to pay attention As many delicious subscribers are in the processes of finding out, that can have real consequences.
And yes, yes. I know that bookmarking sites are not used by as many people as they used to be, but what is to prevent Facebook from becoming tomorrow’s Delicious? After all, if Netflix is in the process of destroying its business, other companies can too, right?
This piece doesn’t refer to email management per se, but it offers very good email management advice (and a bit of evidence that, in spite of predictions to the contrary, email use is truly embedded into our lives):
It is also discussed on the blog of James Fallows, the Atlantic correspondent and a long time advocate of better personal information management practices.
In order to understand how to preserve (or fix) something, you need to understand the lingo. Once you know what the key terms mean, you’ll understand a lot more about how systems interact toward a common goal.
In other words, during the process of putting together my email preservation guidelines, which are now nearing completion of the first draft, I found it extremely useful to actually define the terms used; it was not until completing this task that I felt like I was really beginning to understand exactly what email is and how email actually moves around the Internet and might be preserved. Although not all of the terms I ended up defining can fit in the final report, and although some of the texts need to be further refined, I put a copy of my full glossary under the resources section of this blog:
Last year, in a fit of absence of mind, I threw together a submission to the open source book being crowd-sourced by the Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, Hacking the Academy.
I was very happy to found out last week that my submission was accepted. The first—heavily edited—draft is now available on the University of Michigan Digital Imprints site.
Although I stand by most of what is said in the piece, I would note that it is published on the U of M site without my original citations (some of which were also omitted from the blogged version I originally posed) and in truncated form. In general, and in reading the shortened version, it seems to identify the problem much more than the suggest a solution, other than in the throw away phrase at the end, “traditional archives must be re-imagined in an act of constructive transformation.” Hopefully, when I revise it for the print publication, I’ll be able to explain what I mean by that, and link to actual examples of that being done at programs today.
In my forthcoming guideline to email preservation, I make the point that far too many email ‘preservation’ systems or policy guidelines ask too much of users. Who is going to read, much less understand-, a five page or more email policy document. And if they do, will users really make appropriate decisions about which particular messages to classify as ‘record’ or ‘non-record’ items (assuming they can even understand the distinction)?
To that end, I was refreshed to read this good advice in the New York Times. I really like the techniques it suggests for overcoming email overload, since they really mesh will with a medium term ‘do nothing’ preservation strategy–provided you keep messages on the server and have access to a more or less unlimited amount of server storage, and can come up with a way to migrate or capture messages at a later time, using either email migration software or an email archiving application.
If I have time later, I’ll expand a bit on some of the ideas laid out in this article.
Steve Bailey from JISC Infonet provided the fourth talk at the DPC Preserving Email Seminar in London, on July 29th. In a provocative set of remarks, Steve argued that the records management approach to email has shown little regard for users and the survival of a useful email record unlikely. He proposed an alternate way forward using new technologies such as “email archiving” software alongside a lightweight policy structure based on user needs and requirements. Below I’d like to summarize his thoughts as I interpreted them and am applying them to my email preservation guidance report.
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On Friday August 26th, Susanne Belovari, Ben Goldman, Melissa Salrin, Laura Carroll, Seth Shaw and I spoke about the above topic at the SAA conference in Chicago. For the record, a copy of the (slightly corrected) Powerpoint is below.
Practical Approaches to Electronic Records: What Works Now (pdf, 3.5 MB)
Please note at all content in this Powerpoint is © Copyright 2011 of the respective authors, as some of it may be used for potential future publication.
One of the most neglected aspects of work regarding electronic records and born-digital materials is the appraisal process and specifically the acquisition of material from private parties. Several projects at high profile institutions are examining or have examined issues related to personal digital archives: most prominently the British Library’s ongoing Digital Lives Project, Stanford’s SALT toolkit, Oxford’s Future Arch project, and the AIMS Project. In addition, we should all check out the work by Cathy Marshall and Jeff Ubios, who are working outside the archival community.
As interesting and valuable as this research is, let’s face facts: many donors are reluctant to turn digital stuff over to an archives.
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This post will also be available in the next MAC newsletter.
Over the past year, the University of Illinois Archives has implemented the “Practical E-Records Method,” the result of a sabbatical project undertaken during academic year 2009-2010 with support from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. [1] The project provides recommendations to help small and medium-sized archives make digital curation and digital preservation systematic institutional functions. To implement these recommendations at the University of Illinois Archives, we tested Archivematica—an open-source, OAIS Reference Model-compliant digital preservation system that can be installed on a desktop computer—as a tool to preserve digital objects. Because Archivematica is in its alpha stages, working with this system was a way to explore what the system offered in relation to the needs of the University Archives, as well as provide input to developers as they continue to refine the software for production release.
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