The Electronic Palimpsest: Some Notes on Email Archival

The Electronic Palimpsest: Some Notes on Email Archival: "The Electronic Palimpsest: Some Notes on Email Archival
Darren Brierton
DZR Web Development
Draft #5; Last modified: Thu Feb 7 15:28:23 GMT 2002
Abstract

One of the aims of the Electronic Palimpsest project is to investigate (and implement?) ways of archiving the emails of authors. There are three problem areas to be addressed:

1. retrieving the emails from the author's computer;
2. converting the emails from various proprietary formats into some standard open format;
3. annotating, cataloging and archiving the emails.

No specific proposal is offered for the first issue, although some options are discussed. It is recommended that the second issue be addressed by hiring a programmer to write a bespoke utility, and that the third issue can best be addressed by the creative use of pre-existing XML DTDs."