This week I have been thinking back on my earlier blogs about love letters (I guess I’m just an old romantic a heart!) because my niece, Taff, asked me whether or not she should be saving her emails? “Of course you should, my dear girl,” was my immediate response and then I set my brain to working out just how to go about this task.

Preserving a digital object is not like preserving a book, photograph or document. You can place a book, say, on a shelf for 50 years and, if kept dry, it will last. The same can’t be said about a digital object, which is why digital objects like emails could be considered more delicate than physical ones.

I think of Emails as being ‘At Risk’ documents, often recording a very personal side of a person’s life history, as they reveal much about human nature, at that tiny instant in time. In today’s hectic lifestyle, they are the major source of communication (especially to Gen Y and X aged folk) and are a direct record of many people’s lives.  I believe that if Taff and her friends don’t start preserving their special emails now, much of their personal history will be lost.

Preserving Emails

Emails should be saved and managed just like any other important digital file. Save them on a hard drive as simple text (some people also store them onto a disk), making sure to capture the header information. Taff also asked her boss about whether the company had a policy about saving work-relate emails.

We spent a little money buying some different coloured, acid free papers, which she used to print off the personal emails, which she now has stored in archival quality document boxes. I guess that she is also a romantic as I noticed that she had tied a different coloured ribbon around the Mylar protective sheets enclosing ‘love-mails’ from different beaus! Maybe I’ll do the same with Jack’s love letters one day……..

Which letters or emails do you want to save? Where do you keep them? Do you have some letters from your parents or grandparents, perhaps from earlier beaus? Do let me know the types of letters you want to preserve!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Aunt Ruby Remembers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.