ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2020

The email messages that people send and receive leave behind an information and evidence-rich trail of activities, one that can and should be amenable to future historical investigation and interpretation. Over the past few years, email preservation has become an increasingly feasible—though not yet routine or common—part of archives and digital preservation work. Both the possibilities and challenges of email archiving are detailed in the Report of the Task Force on Email Archives, which promulgates several preservation pathways, but also recommends significant follow-on work to develop the community's ability to preserve email for future research use._x000D_
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This session seeks to engage with individuals from institutions like archives, libraries, museums to generate discussion regarding the current and future developments of email archiving. Such developments include 1) the Email Archiving: Building Capacity and Community (a regrant program), 2) the creation of Requirements for Packaging and Representing Email using PDF, and 3) the Review, Appraisal, and Triage of Mail (RATOM). These projects are intended to promote developments in email archiving by providing frameworks for institutions to engage in email archiving._x000D_
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The session will be split into three informative mini presentations (with time for discussion) about the previously mentioned projects to aid in the understanding of preserving history through email archiving. All programs seek to engage institutions with the tools that currently exist by developing workflows, interoperable systems, metadata pathways, and archival package structures, then sharing the results in forums that will help others build a similar capacity to preserve email.