RESHAPING THE REPOSITORY: THE CHALLENGE OF  EMAIL ARCHIVING
Because of the historical value of email in the late 20th
and 21st centuries, Harvard University Libraries began
planning for an email archiving project in early 2007. A
working group comprised of University archivists,
curators, records managers, librarians and technologists
studied the problem and recommended the undertaking
of a pilot email archiving project at the University
Library. This two-year pilot would implement a system
for ingest, processing, preservation, and eventual end
user delivery of email, in anticipation of it becoming an
ongoing central service at the University after the pilot.
This paper describes some of the unexpected challenges
encountered during the pilot project and how they were
addressed by design decisions. Key challenges included
the requirement to design the system so that it could
handle other types of born digital content in the future,
and the effect of archiving email with sensitive data to
Harvard’s preservation repository, the Digital
Repository Service (DRS).
["Goethals, Andrea", "Gogel, Wendy"]
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