Beyond capstone: toward a new strategy for appraising and selecting emails to transfer to archives within French public agencies

Abstract

This article introduces two new approaches to email archiving within French public agencies undertaken between 2020 and 2023 at the University of Angers (France). It shows how a qualitative survey of producers’ practices and an NLP-based tool might provide the basis for new strategies for the appraisal and selection of email boxes and messages to be transferred to archives. The initial impetus was to overcome difficulties faced by French administrative records managers and archivists in locally implementing the appraisal framework known as the “Capstone” approach, which recommends gathering emails as electronic records and preserving for the long term only specific mailboxes selected in light of the function or position of the email account owner. While Capstone was adopted at the national scale in the French administration, major archival issues remain. Does an approach that focuses on the mailboxes of individuals holding strategic job positions correspond to the reality of bureaucratic work in France? And how should one define accountable criteria for identifying and appraising emails or mailboxes to be preserved on the basis of their enduring value? To address this, we combined two sociological methods, interviews and observation, and developed an interface for classifying messages using NLP. The combination of these two yielded some crucial elements to help archivists shift from the level of a single mailbox to that of a network: a better understanding of the practices of email producers, new criteria for selecting relevant mailboxes, and a new tool for archivists to appraise email archives.