CASE 15 Will They Populate the Boxes? Piloting a Low-Tech Method for Capturing Executive E-mail and a Workflow for Preserving It at the University of Michigan AUTHOR: APRILLE COOKE MCKAY University Archives and Records Programs Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan
[email protected] PAPER DATE: May 2013 CASE STUDY DATE: May 2008‒July 2012 ISSUE: The first part of the paper describes a pilot study testing whether university executives and leaders would flag e-mail messages of long-term value to transfer to the archives. The second part describes the steps taken to move from an ad hoc approach to digital records transfer and processing to one much more routinized. KEYWORDS: Motivating and enabling executives to select correspondence of long-term value is an important aspect of the implementation of many recordkeeping technologies. This study describes a pilot to determine whether executives in the University of Michigan environment would or could identify archival value messages and share them with the archives. The Bentley Historical Library’s new plan and workflow for describing, processing and storing e-mail records for future access is also described. Copyright by Aprille Cooke McKay. Archivists at the Bentley Historical Library who contributed to this project included Nancy Bartlett, Francis X. Blouin, Nancy Deromedi, Gregory Kinney, Michael Shallcross, William Wallach, and Brian Williams. Collaborators from Information Technology Services and the University Library included Margaret Bennett, Jose Blanco, Ezra Brooks, Paul Courant, Cathy Curley, Aaron Elkiss, John Gohsman, Mary Gohsman, Kat Hagedorn, Michael Loviska, James Ottaviani, Laura Patterson, Christina Powell, Kim Rinn, Cory Snavely, Daphne Wakefield, and John Weiss.