By Jim Costin, Bridging the Digital Gap Trainee
Emails. Most of us
have at least one email account with some people having as many as eight or
nine. Since the introduction of the internet, email has been seen as an easy
way of communicating between two parties and has now, for most of us,replaced
traditional posted letters and fax machines.
However, unlike the
picture above shows, emails are not without their downsides. For example, how
often have you had to search back through a giant email thread for something
only to find it’s in an entirely different email account? Or, how often have
you tried to find that one email from someone you need to contact again only to
find that it’s been deleted accidentally and you can’t get it back?
Those are just some
of the issues which present themselves when working with emails as opposed to
letters. From an archival standpoint, however, things are much more difficult.
I thought you could
just take an inbox and preserve that?
Well, that’s not that
easy. Whilst it might be considered easy to just print out all of the emails
and stick them in a box, that is not really solving the problem and, in many
ways, is creating more. The actual exporting of the emails from an inbox can be
very difficult to do depending on which company is hosting the emails.
Microsoft is one of the more difficult ones due to the use of the proprietary
.pst files whereas Google uses the open-source .mbox format and offers a
facility to export all email data in a convenient zipped file.
But, just exporting
the emails is half the problem. Now that they are out, do you preserve them as
you would another digital file or do you to adopt a new process?
But why should we
preserve them?
Preserving emails is
not a small undertaking, despite what it might seem on the surface. Given how
widespread emails are and the vast sizes which some threads can be, some
organisations may think that the cost of preservation may be too high for
something which might not be used for many years.
However, just like
paper archives, email archives present a multitude of evidential benefits and
can help to substantiate a story of decision making. In environments where
quick decisions are required, often times it can be a simple email which
determines the outcome. One example might be the decision by an organisation to
appoint a certain contractor for a job. If it transpires that an incentive was
offered for choosing one over the other, one of the parties may attempt to
showcase that a fair competition was not carried out. By preserving the emails
and ensuring they are still accessible, the organisation will be able to
justify its position and show that protocols were either followed or not
followed.
Had the organisation
not preserved its emails, they would instead have to rely on other means of
justification which would likely not stand up as well if the case went to
court. Admittedly, this is an extreme example but just the same as paper
archives, emails have now gained significant evidential value and in some cases
can make the difference between costly lawsuits and dismissals.
What work has been
done?
At present, the
sector as a whole is aware of the need to preserve emails however, aside from
one or two institutions, very few places can truly say they are ‘preserving
emails’. However, work on researching the topic and suggesting ways to
potentially do it has been done with the Digital Preservation Coalition
releasing a technology watch back in 2011 on it. Furthermore, earlier this year
a collaborative research project was launched between the University of
Hull and this archive to research what software packages exist for email
archiving and whether they can assist in the long-term preservation.
In celebration of
World Digital Preservation Day, the report from the project is now available to
be viewed after having undergone a small update since the time of writing.