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Archiving Email
We started our first online collecting project a few months ago and the most difficult issue that has arisen so far is how to handle emails. This is a big topic. It includes granularity (which we think we've resolved - each attachment, where there are attachments, is its own item, or file. Together, attachments and the email message make up a single "object" or "working group" of category "email").
Questions also include privacy issues: What policies to we present to people who give us collections of emails that they have received? How much scrubbing we do to ensure anonymity (or do we? the more anonymous the message, the less point there is to read it - once you've made all the names some equivalent of "jane doe" and all places "one main street" how much is left in some emails?)? For now, we are leaning towards go over each email after automated scrubbing and ensuring anonymity. We recognize that some messages just can't reasonably be made public.
Has anyone else been dealing with these issues? What have you decided, or what is guiding your policies?
>on paper ... would you redact the names?
It isn't clear what degree of privacy we would offer if we made snail mail public. We're talking about two different sets of files--information available to researchers, and information available to casual browsers (some of whom may be researchers) on the web.
My initial thought was that we just needed to ensure that email addresses are protected from spammers. It also seemed prudent to remove phone numbers. Names? Addresses? If I were making a few pieces of correspondence available to the public from someone who is not a public figure, would I necessarily want (or would the person who submitted email or snailmail necessarily want) the attention possible? I am not convinced that we wouldn't redact snailmail in these circumstances; I am also not convinced that much mail is worth making public if we need to also make it "anonymous."
This is all a long-winded way of saying that the original analogy doesn't seem appropriate. Most archives don't publish snailmail from private people, and from public figures, where unredacted snailmail is made available, we often have to wait until all correspondents (or at least the primary correspondents) are dead.
Dear Ari,
Why do you feel it differs from your policies on archiving snail mail? If someone gave you a collection of correspondence, on paper, would you redact the names? I assume not.
David Bearman
David Bearman