Dave Heelas is the Archivist and Records Manager for Unilever Art, Archives & Records Management
The last challenge we have encountered that I am going to focus on with these short blogs is the question of email. So far not a lot of email content, either individual messages or full accounts have made it to the archive. But with those that have a few questions in how we handle this in the future have arisen.
Although we have workflows in place to preserve email and can be confident that at least in the immediate future this is protected. How to deal with the sheer quantity of it all however is another issue entirely. Current preservation of email has been done in one off ingests with individual emails being sent directly to the archivist dealing with the collection. In the future how we approach this will clearly need to change, the potential of scale for emails that won’t be relevant to our collecting policy will present quite an issue. Gone are the days of the correspondence file, now the majority of people have all their emails in their inbox and outbox and rely on prior knowledge and search tools in order to find older discussions.
If there are emails that relate to a particular project should we request the entire .pst and filter out what’s not relevant, deleting once it is finished. Does that mean that for every project I will be asking for their email folder every time? Is there an easier way to get relevant emails transferred to archives?
There exists software that can help with arrangement and discovery of email to pull out irrelevant and sensitive information. But in most cases an entire inbox would not be desirable but only very specific sections, should the onus be on the archivist to shift through this information to find the relevant pieces? Do we have the time to dedicate to that even with additional tools at our disposal?
Conclusion
Email is the correspondence of the future (and the present?), it is incredibly likely that these will be resources that will have value to future researcher and as such it is vital that the questions surrounding ingesting and cataloguing are something we are bearing in mind as we move forwards. Of the challenges mentioned through these short blogs this is the one that is the biggest question mark, but also the one that I feel that as an organisation we will be able to lean on the lessons learned by others.