Introducing the ePADD+ Project

We are delighted to announce a new collaborative project between Harvard University, the University of Manchester, and Stanford University to enhance our collective capacity to acquire, process, preserve, and make available email archive collections.

Building upon our previous work at the University of Manchester Library with email archives, and running concurrently with our Palladium project, this project, entitled Integrating Preservation Functionality into ePADD, (ePADD+) will integrate long-term email preservation functionality into Stanford University’s open-source email archiving software program, ePADD. The University of Manchester project team are Jessica Smith, co-project manager, Ian Gifford, development consultant and Jochen Farwer, development team.  

At present, ePADD facilitates the management of and provision of access to email archives. The ePADD+ project will expand its capabilities to include steps in the workflow required for the email’s preservation. The enhanced product will provide the digital archiving community with a tool comprehensively supporting the full email archiving lifecycle more robustly. 

The 18-month project was generously awarded $100,000 through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community (EA:BCC) program. EA:BCC is a re-grant program administered through Illinois and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that seeks to build email archiving capacity in archives, libraries, and museums.

Because the requirements of preservation infrastructure and workflows vary greatly across institutions, the enhanced ePADD will support functions for local customization and extensibility. The three project partners will each utilize this capability to configure ePADD for their different organizational contexts. The software development activity will align with open-source best practices in order to support wider community contribution to ePADD and better software sustainability.

The full press release for the project can be found here.

For updates on the ePADD+ project:

• More Rylands Blog posts will follow
• Visit the project page on the ePADD website
• Follow the #ePADD+ project on Twitter @e_padd