Recent Events

◊ August 2008
Society of American Archivists Research Forum. Digital Dilemmas: Archiving E-Mail was presented in the Format Foundations portion of this year's forum in San Francisco, Calif, as a talk and poster.

◊ Panel session at the Society of American Archivists 2008 conference. Capturing the E-Tiger - New Tools for Email Preservation. Panelists were CERP, NC State Archives, and the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives.

◊ Australian Society of Archivists 2008 conference, Perth, Australia.
Rockefeller Archive Center Executive Director Emeritus Dr. Darwin Stapleton discussed Making a Way Out of No Way: The Collaborative Electronic Records Project of the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

◊ June 2008
Pre-conference workshop at the Association of Canadian Archivists 2008 annual conference. Digital Dilemmas: Archiving E-Mail in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The day-long workshop covered all aspects of the project, from record discovery and appraisal through preservation and finally archival storage. Participants had hands-on use of the CERP email preservation tools.

◊ April 2008
Panel Session at the Midwest Archives Conference 2008. More than one way to meet the challenge: Systematic approaches to the capture and preservation of complex digital artifacts in Louisville, Ky. Panelists: CERP, University of Maryland, and the NHPRC project EMCI.

New Content

◊ Friends of CERP, Summer 2008
◊ Record Retention and Disposition Guidelines, Version 2 - April 2008

Background

The Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) and the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) are engaged in a collaborative three-year project to develop, test, and share the technology to preserve digital documents with other non-profit organizations. SIA and RAC will develop and test electronic records preservation, focusing on email, that will draw on the SIA’s more established framework for developing methodologies, and that will draw on the RAC’s network of donor institutions for testing the preservation system and strategies. Working together they expect not only to achieve much more than they could accomplish separately, but they expect to develop a model that should have implications for a broad range of non-profit and philanthropic institutions.

Archival institutions, which provide permanent access to information deemed vital to understanding the history of individuals and organizations, are encountering the loss of digitally-created information before it even crosses their thresholds. Given modern digital forms of information, the long-term preservation of electronic records, particularly email, will be critically important for scholars looking at the first decade of the 21st century, as well as for organizational accountability.

Yet few institutions have taken significant steps toward preservation, in part because there are few accepted standards for such preservation in the archival world. Much of the electronic information created by institutions now becomes inaccessible or is intentionally destroyed within a few months or a few years of creation. This is true for the offices and organizations for which the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Smithsonian Institution Archives have archival responsibilities, as well as for virtually all other nonprofit institutions.

A Focus on Email

The complexity of email records poses a special preservation challenge. The basic functionality of email "threads" is at the heart of this challenge. An email can contain several emails either in the body of the uppermost email or as attachments.