Overview and background

Since surfacing in the 1970s as a modern method of communication exchange, email has been a significant record of history. It has been used for decades as a tool for correspondence, business matters, and government transactions. As a record, it exposes what people convey and receive, as well as when and how they do so. Recognizing email as a critical documentation of life in the digital age, Harvard Library supports the curatorial work necessary to steward email collections. Harvard Library has been an active participant in the email archiving community since 2009, when the Email Archiving System (EAS) was developed as a local solution for processing and preserving email records.

In 2020, Digital Preservation Services partnered with Stanford Libraries on a grant led by the Stanford ePADD team to align the development roadmaps between EAS and ePADD. By 2021, the partners decided on a full convergence of the two systems and additionally partnered with the University of Manchester to integrate the preservation functionality of EAS into ePADD to support a more holistic workflow through the ePADD tool (the ePADD+ project). As of 2023, Harvard Library decommissioned EAS and transitioned to a centrally supported workflow that integrated with ePADD.

ePADD (Email Processing, Appraisal, Discovery and Delivery)

Other tools and projects

Although ePADD is a centrally adopted system at Harvard Library, curatorial units may work with a variety of tools to steward email records. Contact the DPS team if you have additional projects for the below list or would like a consultation on how to integrate them into local workflows.

Email Archiving Tools

Emailchemy - a licensed email format conversion tool that is widely adopted, cross-platform functional, and optionally integrates into ePADD (with appropriate license type)
Aid4Mail - a popular, licensed email format conversion tool that runs on Windows
TOMES (Transforming Online Mail with Embedded Semantics) - an open-source tool developed by the State Archives of North Carolina, the Utah Division of Archives and Records Service, and the Kansas Historical Society to capture, preserve and provide access to government email records
RATOM (Review, Appraisal, and Triage of Mail) - software to assist archives and other collecting organizations with email analysis, selection, and appraisal tasks - integrates with the TOMES software and BitCurator environment
DArcMail (Digital Archives of Email) - open source tool developed by the Smithsonian Institution Archives for preservation and processing and access of one or more email accounts

Formats, standards, and projects

EAXS XML (Email Account XML schema) - schema designed by the State Archives of North Carolina and the Smithsonian Institution Archives to store XML-encoded message and attachment data
PDF/A -

Resources

Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Novice to Know-How Email Preservation course, including ePADD training (free)
Society of American Archivists (SAA) Email Archiving: Strategies, Tools, Techniques course (paid)
SAA Using ePADD in Email Archiving course (paid)

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