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

First

[Anonymous Coward]

As the first post, I welcome my mail to be submitted to this archive...

"obsolute" computing platforms?

[TAGmclaren]

ok, who let that one through? :)

Re:"obsolute" computing platforms?

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, Slashdot revealed is obsolute editing procedures, but promised to absolutely obsolete their old obsolute system.

Let History Decide

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Let History Decide

[polecat_redux]

Dear Eva,

I was pleased to see you at the potluck last night. Your casserole was fabulous - you'll simply have to share the recipe with me sometime.

The Schmidts seem like very nice people. It's so wonderful to see such a happily married couple these days. I really do wish them all the best.

Are we still on for the motor trip up to the city this weekend? I know this great little place that I think you'll just love. Anyway, I hope to hear from you soon.

Lovingly yours,

Adolf

Re:Let History Decide

[blowdart]

It would probably be a good idea for them to accept email from EVERYONE and sort through it later.

Lets see;

• Spam
• Email from mother
• Spam
• Email from porn site subscribed to
• Spam
• Email form mother asking why you haven't replied
• Spam
• Rejection email from craigslist casual encounters
• Spam
• Email laughing at the penis pic you posted on craigslist
• Spam
• Email from your mother asking why you sent her a penis picture
• Chain mail

A good idea? Really?!

Maybe I could help...

[Anonymous Coward]

I could send them my punch card reader. I still keep some of my best pr0n on those cards.

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.

Storage

[Awol411]

Just have Google give everyone a GMail account. Then not only can you store all of their political and scientific mail, they can get targeted advertisements about who to vote for and for whats new in science

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.

An obvious choice

[mv2s]

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

Re:An obvious choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry. He's on the list. Any future email from Douglas Adams will be archived and stored in a secure chamber deep below the earth's crust. We've got Tolkein's address watched too (elfluva@hotmail.com BTW).

Re:An obvious choice

[joelethan]

I think it's appropriate that the BBC are currently broadcasting more, unheard, Hitchhikers Guide. Visit the BBC's H2G2 site where you can hear the latest episode in 5.1 and find out more.

It's recorded with mostly the original cast, and how beautiful the irony that Douglas Adams, for it is he, is voicing the part of Agrajag. Not bad for a dead man. I do hear the tax breaks are good though.

/JE

Note to self...

[Kris_J]

Put Gmail password in escrow with pointer in will.

New email comes to light

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Tony

It doesn't matter. we're not going into Eyeraq
for the Weapons. We're after the oil....

George

>Dear George
>
>Do we really have the evidence to go to war in
>the middle east? I only ask becuase our
>intelligence people aren't really sure enough.
>
>Could it be that we're making a mistake?
>
>RSVP
>
>Tony

Re:New email comes to light

[Begemot]

You've probably misreaded, the article says "canon of work" not "work of cannons".

Re:As a scientist I'd just like to say

[richy freeway]

I think you'll be OK. They did say TOP scientists. ;) :P

Example email

[I7D]

>>>Light is a wave! I can prove it.
>> No its not, light is a particle! I can prove it
> You ninny!

At first thought, a bad idea.

[tod_miller]

Then I thought of the Salmon of Doubt, the book of the scraps of electronic data found on Douglas Adams HDD. But his emails?

Yes letters can be well penned, but is every author going to vainly CC: their emails to a library?

Should they be digitally signed? Oh lawks, Micheal Jackson just emailed me and asked if he could use my toilet [goonies]

Seems dumb to me. Email is such a throw-away medium.

If Shakespeares SMS's were saved, would be citing:

2 b r !2b tat s da qsn, wthr ts noblr n da mnd to sffr da slngs n arws f owtragos frtne,r 2 tk rms agnst a c f trbls n bi opresing, nd dem.

Email is for email. Anyone know any good librarian pr0n sites?

Re:At first thought, a bad idea.

[general_re]

Seems dumb to me. Email is such a throw-away medium.

What are you talking about? I'm not famous yet, but I do have a "canon of work" behind me - I am the author of such instant classics as The Xerox Will Be Offline From 3-5 PM Today and Your Workstation Is Scheduled For Replacement On 4/22 and Can't Meet You For Lunch Today, Something's Come Up Here. Someday schoolchildren will study these, that's how important and eternal they are...

Re:At first thought, a bad idea.

[Azghoul]

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.

better then not doing it

[rvr]

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.

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.

--
Try Nuggets , our mobile search engine. Search for answers to your questions via SMS, across the UK.

Obvious observation

[Raul654]

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

humm

[Mr._Hole]

We can finally get proof that bill gates is knowingly running a monopoly. Steve: so billy what do you want to do today. Bill: plot to take over the world... wohahahah (sig) wohahahahahah Steve: billy that is what we do every night though.. Bill: whacks steve on the head. shudd up and keep lobbying against evil open source. It's stevey, stevey and the brain (gates). (END SIG)!

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.

Helping out

[Erik Hensema]

From the article:

"We have one machine, belonging to evolutionary biologist James Lovelock, for which we don't have a power supply cable."

I'm sending them a spare power cable of mine. Very hard to come by these days with all those modern wireless computers.

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

Linus

[physman]

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

Already been done

[close_wait]

I'm sure the NSA already has copies of all emails ever written, so the British Library just needs to ask them nicely....

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.