Preserving Email - DPC Technology Watch Report 11-01

Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m (Still Not) Yours

“…Sentiment aside, electronic communications like email, tweets, and social media posts can contain the same information a physical letter would, making them records in their own right (Council of State Archivists, 2022;Stanley, 2015). As a form of evidence, electronic communications are just as rich a resource as physical ones (Prom, 2011); as such, they are subject to the same archival considerations as physical letters. We may well mourn the "death" of a beloved format and what it represented, but the question remains the same: "How do we distinguish the historic from the sentimental?"…”

“…The "deluge of digital data" taps into the old chestnut about safety in numbers (Conway, 2010, p. 62). This gives rise to a false sense of security when the reality is that email, text messaging, Twitter "tweets," and other forms of social media posts are cheap, fast, easy to create, easy to manipulate, and easy to erase, whether by intent or by accident (Millar, 2010;Prom, 2011;Science Animated, 2020).…”

After the digital revolution: working with emails and born-digital records in literary and publishers’ archives

“…At around the same time, Chris Proma University of Illinois professor and archivistwrote the DPC report on email preservation, which explicitly stressed the importance of electronic correspondence for future scholars. 'Email records can be used alongside other types of records to develop complete and nuanced narratives', Prom wrote, 41 comparing emails to the letters of the past. To illustrate the historical and legal value of emails, Prom gave the examples of several scandals: Enron, WikiLeaks and the Climatic Research Unit email controversy (also known as Climategate).…”

Preservation and Access in an Age of E-Science and Electronic Records: Sharing the Problem and Discovering Common Solutions

“…In all cases, these actions must be taken with full awareness of any loss of quality or provenance information, and care taken to also preserve a copy of the original file, even when there is little hope that the format will be readable in the future. Identifying an appropriate crosswalk from the native content format to a preservable format may be one of the most challenging parts of the process; even email, arguably the most ubiquitous, plentiful, and simple technology deployed in an academic setting, is difficult to capture and preserve systematically, largely due to the flexibility of configuration and degree of user autonomy (Prom, 2011). As technology evolves, forward migration into new file formats will also be a valuable service, ensuring that documents and other files can continue to be accessed with widely available software.…”