Long-term preservation of emails

Abstract

Email is one of the most common and widely used forms of communication today, but the specificities of the format make it particularly difficult to manage. As a born digital object, email raises both the problems of digital preservation in general and issues specific to electronic mail and correspondence. Its long-term preservation in (public) collections is a novelty in Hungary, but even at international level it is a relatively underdeveloped field. There is an urgent need to elaborate a detailed methodology, as there is already much collection content to be processed, and in the future the so-called LAM (Libraries, Archives, Museums) sector will be increasingly involved in such tasks. The article describes efforts that, among other things, ensure that current endeavours to preserve emails are not competing solutions, but elements of an interoperable toolkit. The authors examine the problems and their applications to email as a born digital object and the specific difficulties that arise beyond these, and they also outline the ways in which preservation can be achieved.