Email: An Appraisal Approach

Abstract

For nearly a half-century, we in the archives, records, and information management professions have either taught our institutions and organizations, or been taught, that a record is a record, no matter the media or manner in which it is created. It is the informational value contained within the item that determines whether it is a record. If it is a record, we then need to identify the temporal value of that information to determine its lifecycle, that is how long it should be maintained and its final disposition, either destruction or accessioning to an archive. However, there still is significant pushback from our institutions’ desires to treat electronic or born digital records as something different from those that are paper-based and/or analog-born, and subsequently want to monolithically manage electronic/digital records’ lifecycles as a single record type. Fueled by the proliferation of desktop computing and subsequent loss of administrative assistants and in-the-trenches records professionals, consistent and effective records management processes have, to a significant extent, been lost in many organizations. This is exacerbated by low-cost and/or Internet cloud-based storage that creates the perception that we can keep all of our electronic/digital data, documents, records and information, and therefore lifecyclemanagement is not required. Alternatively, an organization may be in the opposite situation, in which the information technology infrastructure group begins to run out of space and wants to summarily delete the oldest things in the system. Neither situation is a sound data, documents, records, and information management strategy, nor does it address the potential archival value, or lack thereof, of the items. This problem exists throughout our organizations from our enterprise systems that manage human resources and financial data, to our shared drives, to the darkest and dankest quagmire of all, our email systems. Had Dante Alighieri been a records or informationmanagement professional in the twenty-first century, he may have assigned one level of his hell solely to email.