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British Library Starts Email Archive

Posted by timothy on from the what-about-peter-okoeguale dept.

sushi writes "Australian IT is reporting that 'The British Library is creating an archive to store the emails of the nation's top authors and scientists, as the written word is replaced by electronic messages.' A spokeswoman says it welcomes emails from prominent people in all walks of life. "We want people with a canon of work behind them," she says. The article also talks of the need to read data from (now) obsolete computing platforms..."

10 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Let History Decide by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    A spokeswoman says it welcomes emails from prominent people in all walks of life. "We want people with a canon of work behind them...."
    Actually, just as interesting would be emails from great people BEFORE they became great. And you can't know that ahead of time. Storage is cheap. It would probably be a good idea for them to accept email from EVERYONE and sort through it later.
    1. Re:Let History Decide by pubjames · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Actually, just as interesting would be emails from great people BEFORE they became great.

      Absolutely. Think about artists for instance - many Brit artists these days are famous just for being controversial. The ones that are famous now will probably be forgotten about in the future, and I bet there are artists working today that won't be really appreciated until they are dead.

  2. An obvious choice by mv2s · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A British author with a "canon of work" behind him? This guy better be on the list.

  3. As a scientist I'd just like to say by Illserve · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Store all my emails? um... no thanks? please?

  4. better then not doing it by rvr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was visiting a special collections recently and they had letters from Kipling, T.E Lawrence and Einstein. There is nothing quite like the feeling of touching such documents (with white gloves of course). Reading an email of someone, like Feynman, would not be as interesting as a letter. Nevertheless, I am glad that they are doing this, it is better then not having such information. But something is lost when its not on paper.

    Write a letter to mom.

  5. Obvious observation by Raul654 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm sure this is something that laywers have wet dreams over.

    --


    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
  6. Linus by physman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why has no one suggested sending them Linus's e-mails? His message in the comp.os.minix newsgroup and discussions with Andrew Taunenbaum are infamous. And e-mails between himself and his lieutenants are also pieces of history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

    --
    Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
  7. Re:more general by 16K+Ram+Pack · · Score: 2, Insightful
    some people think the same thing about some document formats.

    Let's say you've got a message that is n years old, where n is quite a number of versions ago, long enough that most people aren't using it, and you've lost your old copy of the reader, and the company in question don't care about you or got taken over and hard drives lost, then how are you going to read it?

    At least with things like the OASIS format documents, it's all there in zipped XML with all the formats publicly defined.

  8. Isn't it funny... by nbert · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...that humans firstly developed techniques to write thoughts down, traversing from oral to written societies. We know of conversations made 400 years ago, because people wrote them down (and stored them somewhere). Nowadays those correspondences are simply lost because your pst file is borked or your hdd crashed. Isn't that a cultural regress? I hope this library will save many interesting mails from vanishing, but I doubt that historians will have better sources in 400 years about the present than what we have about the 17th century.

    --
    I don't read replies by ACs.
  9. Re:At first thought, a bad idea. by Azghoul · · Score: 3, Insightful

    See, my first thought is that it's a wonderful attempt to create the same sort of archives we possess for well-known people of the last couple thousand years. Archived letters give us the only insight into the thinking behind their public works. Imagine how much less we'd know about Jefferson and Adams, for instance, if we didn't have the letters they penned to each other.

    You're right that email is often a less formal medium, but do you /really/ think your average Nobel laureate (heheh, average) is going to be using sms or leet-speak?

    I'm just a random anonymous guy and I can't stand to write such rot.