Curating Emails

The DCC has assembled a group of briefing papers that together form an introduction to curation. These concise overviews are designed to help grow your basic understanding of key curation issues by providing a high-level introduction to a given topic.

The widespread adoption of e-mail as the preferred means of professional communications has dramatically impacted the way that people work. This can be problematic for many organisations as the traditional record-keeping infrastructure is often inadequate for ensuring that messages in individual e-mail accounts are properly managed. Relying on backup tapes or simply purging messages from accounts after a specified period of time is not an appropriate solution to curating e-mails. Rather, organisational, cultural and technical solutions must be implemented to ensure messages are adequately maintained and remain accessible as required.