Gregory Wiedeman
University Archivist
University at Albany, SUNY
Mark Wolfe
Curator of Digital Collections
University at Albany, SUNY
There is currently no preservation format for email that is effective for a wide variety of use cases. Email export files such as MBOX or EML do not contain externally-hosted content and PDF files fail to structure email well enough for computational use. Funded by the Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community program (EA:BCC), the Mailbag Project is aiming to extend Bagit to create a common specification to package email using multiple preservation formats. The project undertook an open process to develop the Mailbag Specification, during which we received important feedback from practitioners that impacted how we think about developing and resourcing digital preservation tools. The tremendous variety of workflows needed for digital preservation suggest the need for networks of smaller, interoperable tools built around platforms we use every day, most notably filesystems; however, this poses interesting challenges to the organizational structure of our libraries and other digital preservation institutions, which might be better suited to support larger tools with more sophisticated interfaces because of the compartmentalization of technology labor.
https://archives.albany.edu/mailbag/
https://github.com/UAlbanyArchives/mailbag