The Future of Email Archives

Email is an increasingly important part of the historical record, yet it is particularly difficult to preserve, putting future access to this vast resource at risk. The Future of Email Archives looks at what makes email archiving so complex and describes emerging strategies to meet the challenge. The report presents the findings of a yearlong investigation of the Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives, sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Digital Preservation Coalition. The 19-member task force, comprising representatives from higher education, government, and industry, was co-chaired by Christopher Prom, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Kate Murray, of the Library of Congress. Addressing the challenges will require commitment and engagement from a wide variety of stakeholders. The task force proposes a series of short- and long-term actions for community development and advocacy, as well as for tool support, testing, and development. The report is intended for the archival community, digital preservation professionals, technologists and software developers, commercial vendors, historians and scholars, institutional administrators, and funding agencies and foundations