Preserving Email

摘要

On April 1, Museums and the Web 2014, which was held in Baltimore, offered Museums and the Web Deep Dive: Assessing Tools and Best Practices for Email Preservation and Access in Art Museums, a precon-ference session on email archiving. The session drew about 30 attendees, primarily museum curators, archivists, and technologists. Chris Prom, assistant university archivist of the University of Illinois (UI) Archives, was the keynote speaker. He began by saying that email preservation is the Wild West of digital preservation and then observed that more than 80% of UI Archives' users look at correspondence. He said that trust, not technology, is the biggest issue in email archiving: "Would you be comfortable letting me look through your emails?" Email is the dominant content type of information requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) because it often contains a "smoking gun" in investigations.