Email Curation and FoI

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E-mail Curation and FoI

• Maureen Pennock
• Digital Curation Centre, UKOLN, University of
  Bath

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Todays talk

• The DCC
• Background context
• DCC aims objectives
• Freedom of Information and E-mails
• Digital Curation E-mails
• Why curate e-mails?
• Life-cycle perspective
• Roles Responsibilities

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The DCC

• Established in 2004 to help solve the extensive
  challenges of digital preservation and curation,
  and to provide research, advice and support
  services to UK institutions
• Funded by JISC the e-Science Core Programme
• Impetus to action
• Growth in e-Science activity and data creation
• Recognition that continuing access to digital
  information is needed

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DCC Objective

• The purpose of our centre is to provide a
  national focus for research and development into
  curation issues and to promote expertise and good
  practice for the management of all research
  outputs in digital format.
• Both national and international

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What is Digital Curation?

• Maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of
  digital information for current and future use
  the active management and appraisal of data over
  the entire life-cycle.
• Enables organisations to address the many
  challenges of effectively managing, preserving,
  and re-using digital materials
• A challenge best tackled collaboratively

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Organisation to Engage Collaborate
communities of practice users
curation organisations eg DPC
Community Development
Collaborative Associates Network of
Data Organisations
management admin support
User services
Research Agenda
research collaborators
Tools and infrastructure
testbeds tools
Industry
standards bodies
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Community Development
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User Services
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Tools Development

• DCC Approach to Digital Curation (white paper)
  sets out the path for development activities
• Monitoring international standards
• Developing a Representation Information
  Registry/Repository (DCC RIR)
• Developing recommendations for tools and methods
  for generating Representation Information
• Creating auditing and certification processes for
  trusted repositories

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DCC Research

• Annotation in Databases
• Data archiving
• Socio-economic and legal issues
• Metadata extraction and curation
• Provenance and databases
• Data transformation, integration and publishing
• Security
• Supporting technologies
• Organisational and cultural challenges to digital
  curation
• Cooperative distributed infrastructures

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DCC summary

• Support and promote continuing improvement in the
  quality of data curation and preservation
  activity
• Nurture strong community relationships between
  practitioners, researchers, and curators
• Address digital curation from all aspects of the
  records life-cycle
• Develop and promote curation knowledge, tools and
  techniques
• Identify and research new organisational,
  technical, and supporting curation challenges

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Freedom of Information Act E-mails
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FoI and E-mails Relevancy

• FoI Act provides
• general right of access to information held by
  public authorities (with exceptions)
• Information not just records
• E-mails not specified in Act
• BUT e-mail messages are information
• E-mails therefore susceptible to FoI requests

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FoI E-mails Issues (I)

• Unclear responsibilities
• Email as personal domain, not organisational
  property
• User reluctance to manage inbox
• Clash between IT and RM policies (if any)
• Enforcement problems
• Inappropriate content
• Undesirable content
• Embarrassing content

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FoI E-mails Issues (II)

• E-mail discovery carries inherent problems
• Dispersed locations IMAP POP Forwarded
  messages mailbox shared drive ERMS EDMS
• Some may be inaccessible to systems admin or
  records managers
• Relevant data may (or may not) be
• In subject line
• In message content
• In message attachment (difficult to search)
• Sheer scale of challenge
• Not indexed for fast searching
• high discovery costs

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FoI E-mails Issues (III)

• Coherence of message threads
• Admissibility of printed versions of e-mails?
• Improper deletion/destruction procedures
• This is not just an issue for FoI
• Information (mis)management
• Risk (mis)management
• Can lead to all sorts of problems...

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E-mail Curation
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Problem From Analogue to Digital

• Digital communications now increasingly common
• Management and preservation has not kept pace
  with implementation and rollout
• E-mail remains a common and pervasive problem

from this
to this
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Best current solution Curation

• E-mail curation
• Encourages more efficient use of e-mail as a
  business tool
• Enables shared and efficient access to
  organisational information
• Facilitates compliance with legal requirements
• Provides framework for addressing risks of e-mail
  usage
• Addresses both disposal and preservation
• Is the best framework for good e-mail management
  across entire life-cycle

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Life-cycle model
Disposal?

• Generic model
• Takes control over the records throughout
  lifetime
• Meaningful chain of custody
• Requires compatibility of different stages
• Requires input from range of stakeholders

Records
Disposal?
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Stakeholders Roles

• The range of stakeholders that affect the
  survival of digital material cuts across the
  whole lifecycle everyone plays an important role
• Management policy-makers
• Users - creators receivers of e-mail messages
• Records Managers
• IT staff
• System mail-server administration
• LAN Manager
• Archivists
• Re-users

'Curators'
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Issues for Creators Recipients

• E-mails must be
• Well-formed
• Well-managed (even sent items!)
• Accessible
• Important elements
• Good creation/response practices
• Inserting metadata
• Headers subject line, addresses
• Message body - context
• Message formats
• Attachments
• Complying with house-style
• Good inbox management
• Compliance with organisational policy

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Issues for Curators

• E-mails must be
• Whole - comprising message body, headers
  attachments
• Captured as appropriate into organisational
  document/records/archives management system
• Destroyed as appropriate
• Important policy and practical elements
• Identifying e-mail records from non-records
• Organisational retention legal requirements
• Proper filing of e-mail records
• Deletion of transient/unnecessary e-mails
• Saving e-mail records independently of e-mail
  client
• Guidance and Training for users ( at all levels)

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Issues for Re-users

• E-mails must be
• Accessible for appropriate re-users
• Exported in an appropriate and usable format
• Legal access and re-use restrictions must be
  observed
• Re-use software may be needed
• Different re-users may have different re-use
  requirements
• E-mails can be re-used for very different
  purposes to why they were originally created

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Conclusions

• Curation is the key to good e-mail management and
  meeting legal including FoI - obligations
• Policy and training are key elements of curation
• Communication between stakeholder groups is
  essential to achieve successful curation
• See DCC website for resources

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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)