Emails%20as%20Records

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Emails as Records

• From Creation to Curation
• Maureen Pennock Digital Curation Centre

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Todays talk

• Introduction to emails
• Origins of email background
• Emails as records
• When is an email a record?
• Which emails are records?
• Curating email records
• Principles
• Technical solutions addressed in later
  presentations

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Introduction to emails

• Origins of email
• ARPANET Advanced Research Projects Agency
  Network
• File transfer protocol developed
• Could send messages to any computer on ARPANET
  network
• First email internal - sent in early 1970's
• Widespread public and private usage by early
  1990s.
• Between 30 and 60 billion email messages now sent
  daily
• Average office worker handles 75 a day

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What is an email?

• An electronic document transmitted across a
  computer mail system
• Conforms to a standard transmission format
• Comprises contents, possible attachments, and
  metadata
• May be 1-1 or 1-many

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What is an (electronic) record?

• Evidence of transaction
• Stored information
• An original or primary or sole version of a
  document
• An authentic document
• The content, not the format in which it is
  stored, determines the status of record or
  non-record

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When is an email a record?

• Organisational email records
• Not all emails are records
• Neither necessary nor desirable to keep
  absolutely everything
• Generated or used in the course of business and
  contains evidence of business activities,
  decision-making processes, or documents corporate
  memory
• Valuable content in the message body OR in an
  attachment
• Varying retention periods
• Can include emails on home PCs!
• Personal email records
• Any email considered valuable by the
  creator/recipient

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Email record content types

• 100 of businesses use email for business
  purposes (AIIM Survey 2003)
• Administrative and commercial activities
• Contracts and agreement negotiations
• Financial issues
• Legal issues
• Project records
• Tendering processes
• Retention schedule should identify categories of
  records

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Curating email records

• Problem Emails often created managed in ad-hoc
  manner
• Users perceive email as personal domain
• Ad-hoc creation management hinders effective
  curation
• Solution Curation
• Encompasses active management and appraisal of
  data over the entire life-cycle
• Includes creation stage
• Maintains and adds value to records
• Can ensure records are authentic and reliably
  managed
• Enables other users to reliably re-use the
  information

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Benefits of curating email records

• Facilitates compliance with legal discovery
  requests
• Encourages more efficient use of email
• Enables shared access to messages
• Achieves organisational retention requirements
• Reduces storage requirements
• Provides trusted and reliable email records for
  future use

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Curation 1 Life-cycle management

• Creation
• Active Use
• (Disposal)
• Archiving
• Preservation
• Access
• (Disposal)
• Re-use

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Curation 2 - Policy

• Policy framework
• Policy reflects organisational commitment
• Must address various components
• Acceptable use and unacceptable misuse
• Content and creation practices
• Retention and storage
• Preservation and curation
• Responsibilities
• May require more than one policy to cover all
  aspects

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Curation 3 - Integration

• Integrate email records management into overall
  record-keeping infrastructure
• May require change to existing infrastructure
• Tackles perception of individual ownership
• Enables shared access to messages
• Allows access to all messages and related records
  from a single location
• Very useful when dealing with discovery requests

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Curation 4 - Collaboration

• Communicate and collaborate a large number of
  stakeholders play a role in email management
• Creators create, receive, store messages
• Records managers provide guidance, advice,
  training
• IT staff provide technical infrastructure,
  access to stored messages
• Management reinforce policy
• All stakeholders must take responsibility for
  their part in successful email management

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Summary

• Emails are records and may require long term
  curation and preservation
• Preservation begins at source
• Good creation practices build persistent messages
• Persistent messages can last through time with
  appropriate care
• Appropriate steps must be taken by appropriate
  stakeholders at all stages of the life-cycle
• Records management and curation provide a sound
  framework for life-cycle management

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Thank you. Questions?

• Maureen Pennock
• m.pennock_at_ukoln.ac.uk
• Join the DCC Associates Network at
  http//www.dcc.ac.uk