MidiPres January 2021: a closer look at email

No, not emails (Image by Andrys Stienstra from Pixabay)

It doesn’t seem five minutes since the last meeting of Midipres (and I said that last time) but here we are in 2021 and time for another Midlands Preservation Network event which brings together practitioners from across the UK Midlands region to share and discuss their digital preservation stories. This meeting had a special theme – email preservation – which proved a popular topic with many and we had some lively discussion covering a range of topics from normalisation to appraisal and access.

We kicked off with a case study from a group member who had received some emails as part of a deposit of various digital records from a Parish Council (no not Handforth!) including emails saved onto a cd in an .eml format. The archives were having trouble opening the emails* and had concerns that converting them to another format as that created problems with the attachments… We had a useful discussion around how much of the available literature addresses the issue of migrating and dealing with entire mailboxes rather than having a handful of emails amongst other material (I’ve certainly come across the latter scenario more than once). We talked about the various formats that you were likely to come across – .pst, .mbox and so on and how much or little influence you might have about asking for a particular format.

A couple of others shared their work – one archivist had been collecting Covid update emails from the Chief Executive’s Office as part of their contemporary collecting strategy but had concerns (don’t we all) about embedded links to external content including videos. I don’t think anyone has the answer to these issues but there would be useful work mapping out what might be possible and the sorts of tools needed to achieve this kind of capture. Another group member shared a success story in that they had succeeded where I have failed (I am not bitter about this at all!) in getting a deposit of the inbox of one of the Chief Officers in their organisation. It required developing a new deposit agreement and some significant degree of negotiation but to me sounds like a huge success and I look forward to hearing on further updates on this, hoping we might be able to emulate their success. We discussed the attitudes people have towards their emails and how the mixing of personal and professional in email accounts made the management and capture of email particularly challenging. One of the group mentioned James Lappin’s recent blog post on this very topic and I shall be reading his article with great interest. Getting people to weed their emails in advance of depositing sounds like it could be challenging and we were pointed towards a recent IRMS podcast where Vincent Hoolt of the Netherlands National Archives discussed the pitfalls of exactly this, talking about how they had inadvertently received the divorce papers of a government official – not just embarrassing but a GDPR nightmare!

The thrill of a live demo of Emailchemy (photo author’s own)

I followed this up by giving as live demo (brave I know) of Emailchemy – a tool for converting email to different formats. I’ve had a go with this and with Aid4Mail in their demo versions and can definitely seeing them being useful for future work especially in conjunction with ePADD which I’ve also written about before. I am very enthusiastic about the potential use of things like ePADD for both appraisal and access to email collections. There was more discussion about cataloguing email collections and I’m sure we’ll be looking to talk more about cataloguing born digital in a future session.

In the meantime I think I’ll get back to sniffing around after those institutional email accounts!

*update: problem now solved: a file path issue 🙂

Autumn MidiPres

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

I can’t believe that time has moved round so quickly – what happened to the summer (don’t answer that)? and already we’ve had the second meeting of the Midlands Digital Preservation Network. After the last meeting we sent out a feedback form to try and get a sense of what people might want to discuss. It was important for us from the outset to get as much feedback and input as possible. There seemed to be an interest in “transfer” and by that we interpreted this as “getting the stuff into your archive” which I have always maintained is one of the hardest parts of digital preservation – it doesn’t matter how fancy your preservation system is if you can’t capture the “stuff” you want in the first place then you are not doing any kind of preservation.

I had been doing some work on using Sharepoint for depositing/collecting archives and I thought I would share my experiences with the group to get feedback, prompt others to have a go or just get people thinking a bit more about their record keeping and managing environment. A quick show of virtual hands suggested the majority of people at the meeting worked for organisations which used Sharepoint (even if they didn’t use it much themselves). On my part I have found myself using Sharepoint much more than I did during the last six months as a way of working collaboratively and remotely and our Records Manager reports that the number of Sharepoint Libraries and Teams Sites in the organisation has mushroomed in the last six months. This presents huge record keeping and compliance challenges as well as digital preservation issues but here is not the place to go into it (another blog perhaps…). However because of its ubiquity Sharepoint does seem to be a way of sharing and gathering collections. My experiments were purely in the context of internal transfers and I soon found it was beyond my skills to be able to set up the permissions to satisfy my data security requirements. Although my IT colleagues were able to help with this I still haven’t really been able to achieve what I want. I’d love to hear from anyone who has managed to set up something which they are happy with! We had some discussions about the kind of metadata you might or might not be able to capture plus that old chestnut last modified date.

Laura then bravely offered to some live tool demo-ing and she kicked off with showing the tools that they are using at the University of Nottingham to work with their audio visual collections. The thing about digital preservation work and trying to move forward with it is that it will depend on your specific situation and what your goals and priorities are. For Nottingham it was working with various A/V collections and in particular the collections of a local musician which itself has thrown up a number of digital preservation challenges. Laura first explained that she had found this guidance produced by New York University which I’m going to have a good look at myself. She then went on to walk us through two tools she had been using: Exact Audiocopy and IsoBuster for audio CDs and DVDs respectively. It gave us a chance not just to see the tools in action but also to discuss how some the tools are used and we spent a bit of time discussing the pros and cons of disk imaging.

And to round off by popular demand Laura also live demoed Teracopy and those of us who have had a go with it (and I include myself in this) discussed the fact that it was a very useful tool but not an easy one to use (I for one find it quite complicated). Its checksumming ability is clearly of great benefit but just getting the checksums is one thing – working out how and when to use and check them is quite another!

Finally we agreed we would – where we could – share some of our procedures (must go and do that now!) and I think that would be a really useful discussion point for future meetings.

All the tools we have talked about are free to download in some version of another and we are all keen to keep the network system agnostic.

I came away full of ideas and thoughts of things I need to be getting on with – it’s really valuable to connect with others and get inspiration at times like these. Here’s to the next meeting – and as ever do get in touch with me if you want to know more (or join in!) rachel dot macgregor at warwick dot ac dot uk or DM me via Twitter @An_Old_Hand