Introduction
Email is a critical record of our time; there are over 4 billion email users globally, and on an average day, over 270 billion messages are sent and received. Confidential and convenient, it captures significant insights into the lives and decisions of institutions and individuals alike.
Though email has been a prevalent communication platform for decades, libraries and archives continue to face challenges in acquiring and managing it throughout its lifecycle. Technically, email is a complex interaction of subsystems for composition, transport, viewing, and storage. Organizationally, it is a highly sensitive record that requires appropriate designation for records management or trusting relationships with donors. Workflows must accommodate capture of email from multiple locations, high-volume appraisal and processing, privacy and legal requirements, preservation of multiple parts and formats, and often regulated access.
In this two (half-day each) workshop, instructors will equip attendees with knowledge concerning fundamental concepts of the challenges and opportunities inherent in email archiving. Enrollees will explore a selection of tools designed to support the acquisition, appraisal, processing, preservation, and access of email records and apply them to real world use cases, to design workflows appropriate for their own needs. In addition, the instructors will provide an overview of several US-based projects developing next generation email archives functionality.
**This workshop was originally developed for the Society of American Archivists’ Digital Archives Certification curriculum and has been revised and enhanced for usage with the Digital Preservation Coalition.**
Recordings (DPC Members - Login Required)
DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy
The DPC Community is guided by the values set out in our Strategic Plan and aims to be respectful, welcoming, inclusive and transparent. We encourage diversity in all its forms and are committed to being accessible to everyone who wishes to engage with the topic of digital preservation, whilst remaining technology and vendor neutral. We ask all those who are part of this community and to be positive, accepting, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others in alignment with our DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy.