E-mail Preservation

Lots of interesting work going on at North Carolina State Archives – plenty to read on their electronic records page. One project I’d particularly like to highlight is their work on the preservation of e-mail.

E-mail seems to be one of those types of electronic record about which there’s been lots and lots of discussion about how difficult it is to preserve, but not so much (at least that I knew of) in the way of practical advice of how you might go about attempting to keep it.

As well as the very practical guidelines for users, and suggested retention periods for e-mail, staff in the North Carolina State Archives Government Records Branch have been working on a collaborative project to transform e-mail from its native format into XML for preservation. The catalyst for this project was the deposit of e-mail messages from a former North Carolina governor and his staff. The website for the e-mail project has a full set of documentation, and links to other e-mail preservation initiatives. More recently, North Carolina has been working with the Collaborative Electronic Records Project (CERP) at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the Rockefeller Archive Center, and an XML schema for a single e-mail account has now been published.

I have also visited the Smithsonian Institution Archives, who have also developed some automated tools to help with the processing of e-mail archives, which they hope to make available on their website in due course. The CERP Project will be of particular interest to UK local archives, since this work has been achieved with an emphasis on low-cost solutions suitable for small and medium-sized organisations.

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