Kutatói e-mail hagyaték archiválása és feldolgozása

Abstract

The management of born-digital content is becoming an increasingly relevant task in the different cultural fields, thus the long-term preservation of digitally generated material has been in the focus of the archivist community since the beginning of the new millennium. In the early twenty-first century, the Library of Congress pointed out its concerns about the fragility of the solely digitally created records. Since such material does not have an analog (physical) version, there is a greater risk of either getting lost, or not being available or accessible in their original form as historical records for future researchers. Preserving digitally generated correspondence between individuals has been an important research area of digital archiving for many years. There are already good practices for archiving e-mails, being a priority especially in the corporate sector. However, merely preserving and making e-mails researchable is not the only issue, since in the case of the cultural heritage materials for instance a critical attitude and a curatorial practice is also essential in the archiving work. Furthermore, one of the reasons why a general solution to e-mail preservation still has not yet been found is that archiving e-mails at different stages of their lifecycle requires radically different solutions. Our research project at the National Laboratory for Digital Heritage focuses on the longterm preservation of an e-mail heritage, more precisely the electronic correspondence of a Hungarian critic and literary historian from Cluj-Napoca (Transylvania), Lajos Kántor. We are investigating how e-mail archiving tools can be used in this specific field, how e-mails can be made visible and researchable as an integral part of the overall heritage, and how the experience gained in preserving and processing paper-based correspondence can be used in archiving and publishing e-mails.