Email is one of the critical forms of documentation of life in the digital age, and the preservation of email is central to the mission and values of archives and archivists.
Harvard University, The University of Manchester, and Stanford University have announced a project that will support the acquisition, processing and preservation of email as archival collections. The project, entitled Integrating Preservation Functionality into ePADD, or ePADD+, integrates long-term email preservation functionality into Stanford University’s open-source email archiving software program, ePADD. The improved ePADD product will provide the digital archiving community with a tool that can comprehensively support the full email archiving lifecycle more robustly. These improvements will support the capacity for local customisation and extensibility, to cope with local variations in preservation infrastructure and workflows.
Each of the three project partners will utilise this capability to configure ePADD for their different organizational contexts. The software development activity will align with open-source best practices in order to support wider community contribution to ePADD and better software sustainability.
The 18-month project was generously awarded $100,000 through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community (EA:BCC) program. EA:BCC is a re-grant program administered through Illinois and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that seeks to build email archiving capacity in archives, libraries, and museums. The proposed activities are a direct outcome of recommendations from The Future of Email Archives report, also funded by the Mellon Foundation, which emphasizes the importance of better interoperability and integration between the many disparate email archiving tools that have surfaced in the digital archiving community.
For further information about the ePADD+ project:
* Visit the project page on the ePADD website
* Follow the #ePADD+ project on Twitter @e_padd