British Library Starts Email Archive

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..."

Comments

Re:Maybe I could help...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it turns out that the idea of donating a punch-card reader (parent post) isn't offtopic, if you read the article. They are in fact trying to deal with a gigantic backlog of electronic data from machines from the 1960's which they do not currently have a proper means to decipher--such as the work of Donald Michie, the artificial intelligence pioneer, and World War 2 codebreakers. They have the computer data, and in some cases even the comptuers, but no way to do anything with it. Manuals cannot be found (and having never been officially published, are not easily locatable), and critical hardware is broken or missing.

Text-To-Speech

[fembots]

One good thing about digital archieve is the possibility to use text-to-speech software to read those emails to people with sight problems.

Re:Text-To-Speech

[Triv]

I don't disagree with the thought, but there's more to understanding a book than the words. Inflection, emotion and all those things that computer's can't quite do are critical to understanding and are even more critical to enjoyment of the text.

It's because of this that, while text-to-speech software is ubiquitous, libraries and not-for-profits (Like these guys, for one) still hire people (or accept volunteers) to read books for the visually impaired.

Like I said, I have nothing against what you're proposing and these digital copies will definitely help in the future, we're just not there yet. :)

Triv

Available email collections

[j.leidner]

Some of these are even available for research purposes. The HCI expert Ben Shneiderman is said to prepare the release of his personal email archive for research purposes. Another source of emails is the Enron corpus.

For researchers in style or computational linguistics, the prospect of getting the hands on more people's INBOXes is mind-boggling. Eventually, I hope this will improve the horrible present-day interfaces to email.

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Excellent idea

[gguppi]

I think this could be quite valuable indeed. Another thing that I would love to see is to have an index for scientific papers such as the excellent Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ coupled with a moderated discussion forum like the one here at slashdot for discussion of the strong/weak points of each scientific paper. If well done, I think this would be a huge benefit to the research community.

more general

[wikinerd]

The problem is more general, it is not only limited to emails.

As digital storage becomes more popular, someday we will lose valuable historical data and information because we will be unable to read the digital code of some device.

If a very big asteroid hits Earth and civilisation returns to its 19th century state, for example, and after some time the future archaelogists try to discover the pre-asteroid history of civilisation, they will have no idea what these chips and CDs and memories are! they will be unable to even think that these things contain information written by humans.

There is a period in human history called "dark ages" (before the middle ages) because the historians know very little about it and we have found nearly no writings from that era. see: http://www.wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=Dark_Ages

Atlas

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

I wish they'd listed more of the hardware they're having problems getting hold of or getting working. I found this about the Atlas, and I actually remember the Sinclair ZX-80. Sure enough, as the site says they're sometimes sold on e-bay. Someone want to tell the library to get their bid in?

Re:better then not doing it

[MvD_Moscow]

Can please explain how something is lost when its not on paper? In terms of the actual info I really don't see any difference. They only advantage that paper documents have over electronic ones is that you can read them away from a PC. However, I don't see how that makes a document more interesting.

They could do worse than to harvest

[museumpeace]

all of the +5 insighfull material from the /. archives. If /. comments were counted in the "cannon of work" for an author, some of us have truely extensive output. As for "famous", well, I got my 15 minutes of fame on slashdot....5 seconds at a time and so did you.

archiving digital data

[Orp]

This subject touches upon the larger issue of effectively archiving
digital data, period. I have given a lot of thought to this because
I have been keeping a journal since I was 12 (I am 36) and while its
contents will undoubtedly only ever prove important to me, I want it to
be preserved. I still keep a pen-on-paper journal and occasionally spend
a few hours scanning it in to TIFF images and burning them to CD-ROM,
and occasionally backing those up to a data archival site.

I save and archive all of my outgoing email and while a fair amount of
it is 'background noise' it does serve as a reminder of what I've been
doing with my life, the people I've known, my changing viewpoints, and
fills in the gaps that the journal does not cover.

I suppose it all boils down to whether you have anything interesting to
say, regardless of whether it is in ASCII text or a quill dipped in ink
on papyrus.