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. A new report from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) looks at what makes email archiving so complex and describes emerging strategies to meet the challenge.

One of the report’s seven “high-impact, long term” activities is a call to improve options for leveraging PDF in email archiving workflows, including development of specifications for email archiving using PDF.

The Future of Email Archives Task Force was designed to examine the complexities of email archiving, and to identify and describe new strategies to meet these challenges. The project was established based on the recognition that email, although a vital part of the historical record, is nonetheless notably difficult to preserve. 

Addressing the challenges requires commitment and engagement from a wide variety of stakeholders. The task force proposes a variety of short- and long-term community activities, including tool support, testing, and development.

The 19-member task force that developed the report included representatives from higher education, government, and industry. It was co-chaired by Christopher Prom, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Kate Murray, of the Library of Congress.

More than 2.6 billion people currently use email; on an average day 215 billion messages are sent and received for personal and business communication. Email documents personal and public stories, yet relatively few archives have policies in place for systematically capturing, preserving, and providing access to email. Complexity is part of the problem. “Email is not one thing, but a complicated interaction of the technical subsystems for composition, transport, viewing and storage,” notes the report.

“Archives can and should do everything they can to capture and preserve email, if we want to assemble a historical record that future generations can interrogate and use,” said Prom.

Some archives have made progress in creating preservation workflows, and the report includes examples from five institutions. Most archives, however, are being left behind. “Just as the protocols that define the email environment are heavily standardized to facilitate interoperability across the diverse landscape of email, so too must the tools to preserve email be able to interact with one another across the lifecycle,” write the authors.

“Some protocols and tools already exist but their functionality is not yet mature and there is much work ahead to implement scalable, community-led solutions,” adds Murray.

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.

The full Report is available HERE