title: RESHAPING THE REPOSITORY: THE CHALLENGE OF  EMAIL ARCHIVING
creators: Andrea Goethals Wendy Gogel
abstract: Because of the historical value of email in the late 20th
  and 21st centuries, Harvard University Libraries began
  planning for an email archiving project in early 2007. A
  working group comprised of University archivists,
  curators, records managers, librarians and technologists
  studied the problem and recommended the undertaking
  of a pilot email archiving project at the University
  Library. This two-year pilot would implement a system
  for ingest, processing, preservation, and eventual end
  user delivery of email, in anticipation of it becoming an
  ongoing central service at the University after the pilot.
  This paper describes some of the unexpected challenges
  encountered during the pilot project and how they were
  addressed by design decisions. Key challenges included
  the requirement to design the system so that it could
  handle other types of born digital content in the future,
  and the effect of archiving email with sensitive data to
  Harvard’s preservation repository, the Digital
  Repository Service (DRS).