[Asis-l] Museums and the Web Deep Dive: Assessing Tools and Best Practices for Email Preservation and Access in Art Museums

[Richard Urban]

Forwarded here on behalf of Rich Cherry, this announcement may be of
interest to anyone concerend with email archiving in LAM institutions:

Museums and the Web Deep Dive: Assessing Tools and Best Practices for
Email Preservation and Access in Art Museums

A special session hosted April 1st as part of Museums and the Web 2014.

Session Chairs: Susan Chun and Dale Kronkright

As many of you know, I have been very concerned about the lack of email
archiving in museums. I chaired a session a few years ago at MCN [the
annual conference of the Museum Computer Network, MCN] and found that I am
not alone in my concern. Since then, things have not improved. In fact,
one might say they have worsened as the volume of email continues to
increase, as does its use for types of museum correspondence that are
crucial for us to preserve.

The problem, simply stated, is that lack of robust archiving and retrieval
for email correspondence in today’s art museums may limit the primary
source materials available to future generations of students, scholars,
and the public. This is an issue for directors, curators, educators,
researchers, archivists, collection managers, and technology staff. While
there are commercial products for email archiving, they are built to serve
corporate data-retention policies, not future research and scholarship.
Focused on maintaining emails for five, seven, or ten years, these
products rarely are expected to retain emails indefinitely. They may have
inherent limitations for our community due to their different intended
contexts of use.

It is time for us to focus on this problem as a community: time that we
look at what is being done to archive email in corporate settings,
universities, and state and federal governments, and time we do something
about a problem that has been developing in our museum community for more
than 20 years.

So, I have asked Susan Chun and Dale Kronkright to chair and organize a
Museums and the Web full-day Deep Dive into this issue. We will explore
previous and ongoing work in the GLAM community , examining the problem
from both technology infrastructure and procedure and policy angles. We
will review commercial and open source technology solutions. We will
gather commercial vendors and see how their solutions match our needs. We
will hear about the work being done in other spaces such as government and
education. We will publish the results, and form a working group to move
this issue forward, supported by the proceedings of this workshop.

I have posted an overview of the issues, as well as a link to the
registration page, here.

<http://mw2014.museumsandtheweb.com/museums-and-the-web-deep-dive-assessing-tools-and-best-practices-for-email-preservation-and-access-in-art-museums/>

(note that this event is part of Museums and the Web 2014, but it is a
separate registration; participants need not attend the whole MW 2014
conference).

Deep-Dive registration includes coffee breaks, lunch, and a special
reception. You can register here.

<http://mw2014.museumsandtheweb.com/registration/>

We are now developing the detailed agenda and background reading list. I
would love to hear your suggestions and comments to ensure we don’t miss
anything important. We are also looking for participants for lightning
talks on desired use cases or horror stories or top wishes for
functionalities related to email archiving. To further the discussion we
have created aGoogle Group for email archiving in museums.

Please forward this announcement to prospective attendees and post to
lists as appropriate.

Looking forward to seeing you at this MW Deep Dive on April 1st, 2014.

Rich
--
Rich Cherry Co-chair, Museums and the Web
@richcherry
www.museumsandtheweb.com
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