Thanks to the great work of my predecessor Fran Baker, the UoM Special Collections hold the email archive of Carcanet Press. The collection consists of 300,000 items, both emails and attachments, and is stored within Preservica, our chosen digital preservation software.
The Library was recently delighted to announce that we have received funding from the Arts Council for a project to further our work in the management and accessibility of email archives.
In preparation for this project, we have been exploring ePADD, an open source software application developed by Stanford University specifically for the management of email archives. ePADD offers an incredibly impressive range of automated functionality, runs through a web browser, and includes 4 modules:
- appraisal and processing for management
- delivery and discovery for giving access
With the support of Jochen Farwer from the UoM Digital Applications team, my colleague Victoria Stobo and I have been working on an adapted version of the delivery module, and am pleased to announce that we are now ready to launch our pilot site.
The site includes a sample of 48 emails, which will enable our donors and researchers to explore ePADD, for themselves.
ePADD offers:
- browsing by and editing of correspondents
- advanced searching by correspondent, keyword, date, and image and non-image attachments
- automated editable identification of entities, like corporations, events and awards
- automated lexicon analysis which identifies potentially sensitive or confidential data
- functionality for adding labels and annotations to emails, both in bulk and individually
- downloadable reports on each module
- data presented in graph form
A survey is also underway to gauge responses to the challenges of email archives from donors and researchers.
Please take a look, I’d love to hear what you think!
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