#MySchoolLibrarian

From the Emerging Technologies Committee, by Paul Kelly

Welcome to what will hopefully be a recurring dispatch from the Emerging Technologies Committee. This month, we wanted to turn DCLA members onto an awesome tool that can help cultural heritage institutions come to grips with email archiving. If you’re involved in electronic records management, read on.

Consider the offices of the past, with filing cabinets, hanging folders, interoffice mail, and external correspondence. Perhaps it’s stating the obvious, but the common element here is paper, and library professionals are historically pretty good at dealing with that. But do you have a work email account? Do you use it for official business? In the past, would that business have been conducted via paper correspondence? If so, what are you currently doing with those emails? Printing them? Nothing at all? What should we be doing? This stuff is important – you’d think we’d be doing something.

ePADD, developed by Stanford University Libraries, allows you to not only create, appraise, and process email archives, but also make them discoverable, all while maintaining the structure and functionality of a live account (minus composition and sending functions). By implementing RM guidelines, such as retention/deposit schedules, deletion of non-essential messages and spam, and sticking to robust folder structures, suddenly email archiving becomes far less daunting. ePADD allows you to either select specific folders for ingest or to capture an account wholesale, and facilitates browsing by correspondent, organization, location or attachment. In addition, it allows full-text searching of the archive, applies LC subject headings to known-entities, and even allows the archivist or librarian to create their own subjects to facilitate cataloging and finding aid creation. And, just like BitCurator (a tool for extracting information from obsolete media), it can redact sensitive information such as phone numbers and other personal information.