Email is a story keeper and a storyteller; over 3.5 billion people currently use email, and on an average day, 281 billion messages are sent and received. Amidst the daily chatter, email evidence accumulates, and the future historian bides their time until the day when they can sift through the email archives, piecing together tomorrow’s histories.
To enable this future research, libraries and archives must capture, preserve, and provide access to the evidence that email holds. Yet to date, relatively few archival programs have taken that leap in a systematic way. Part of the problem is complexity. Email is not one thing, but a complicated interaction of technical subsystems for composition, transport, viewing, and storage. Archiving email involves multiple processes. Archivists must build trust with donors, appraise collections, capture them from many locations, process email records, meet privacy and legal considerations, preserve messages and attachments, and facilitate access.
For more information and to register, please visit
https://mysaa.archivists.org/nc__event?id=a0l0b00000EMhjwAAD, or contact the Society of American Archivists Education Department at
education@archivists.org.
