Title: 2013 – 2023: A Review of Ten Years of Email Archiving in France
Author(s): Marion Ville
Abstract: Emails are an essential medium of communication. Their management is an organizational, security, legal and financial issue for all organizations.
The interdepartmental digital archiving Vitam program, which develops a digital archives management system on behalf of the French government, could not help but wonder about the acquisition, preservation and access to the documents and data contained in email archives. In 2013, it carried out a proof of concept on email archiving, at a time when few archive services in France had embarked on the acquisition of this type of document.
Ten years later, the French landscape in terms of digital recordkeeping has changed significantly. In practice, some archives have put in place strategies for archiving email and tools have been made available to assist in their effort.
This article looks at the transition from theory to practice of a more operational acquisition of this type of archive in a French context.
Type: Long Paper
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Title: Notions of value in digital objects
Author(s): Michael Popham
Abstract: The world of digital preservation and archiving has drawn heavily on the thinking of our analogue predecessors. When it comes to selecting materials, we are familiar with the idea of appraisal: “the process of determining whether records and other materials have permanent (archival) value” [1]. Typically, the notion of “value” is then further refined into broad sub-genres, such as evidential, informational, intrinsic, contextual, and so forth [2]. At iPres 2022, a panel session and related poster examined the problem of “The Value of Catastrophic Data Loss” but the debate repeatedly returned to measuring this value in terms of economic costs. This paper unpicks the notion of value further, and offers some reflections on how these ideas might apply to digital materials and be predicated on the essential differences between analog and digital sources.
Type: Short Paper
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Title: PDF/mail: From Theory Towards Practice
Author(s): Tom Habing, Peter Wyatt, Eden Irwin, Ruby Martinez, Duff Johnson and Christopher Prom
Abstract: Email is one of the most ubiquitous forms of communication in both personal and professional contexts. The EA-PDF (Email Archiving with PDF) project is developing a PDF specification (PDF/mail) for email archiving, as well as an open-source tool to convert emails to the new PDF format. By creating a new specification defining common understandings for archiving email, the project aims for PDF/mail to lower barriers to effective email preservation that meets the needs of the archive and digital preservation community. This includes building a community to support the project, developing the PDF specification itself, and creating a proof-of-concept tool to convert emails to PDF. With an open-source tool available for converting emails, archivists and other professionals—particularly those working in context where they do not have access to technologies supporting email preservation–will have a straightforward and cost-effective way of preserving emails for posterity, complementing other preservation methods and tools.
Type: Short Paper
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Title: Saving Stan: Preserving the Digital Artwork of Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski
Author(s): Taryn Ellis
Abstract: It is not unusual to find at-risk obsolete carriers in archival collections, but these 3½ inch ADFS-formatted floppy disks hold original digital artworks from the late career of a pioneering Australian multimedia artist. The graphics files, created on an Acorn Archimedes in the late 80s and early 90s, had not been seen for more than 25 years, and the difficult process of preserving and providing access to these artworks, and their associated software, highlights the fragility of the material from this era. The case study presented here discusses how the State Library of South Australia combined open-source and community software to automate the extraction and migration of obsolete content from these disks while capturing filesystem and other metadata—and discovered that emulation is not always the simplest solution.
Type: Short Paper
Event Timeslots (1)
Wednesday, September 20
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TP-1