Anthony Cocciolo will present a study that examines strategies to appraise significant email as a cultural heritage resource, using an art museum located in the Northeast Untied States as a study site. The central research question is, by what method can email be appraised such that only significant email is retained? To study this, email messages from three mailboxes (an executive and two curators) are manually appraised for retention using a rubric. Following this manual appraisal, strategies for expediting this appraisal process, using what is learned from the manual appraisal process, are explored. A major finding of this study is that sent mail is almost always significant, although preserving only sent mail, or preserving sent mail in combination with inbox items that have been acted upon (replied to or forwarded), are not sufficient to capture significant correspondence. Rather, a social network approach holds the most promise to accelerate the process of email appraisal. This means that appraisal should be conducted by gaining an understanding of the mailbox owner’s social network, and appraising messages in groups by the sender/receiver. Some senders/receivers can be retained in entirety because of the nature of the relationship between the sender/receiver and the mailbox owner (e.g., professional relationship where correspondence is always related to mission of museum), where other senders/receivers require more fine-grained appraisal (e.g., relationships that span personal and professional life).
About the Author:
Anthony Cocciolo is an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, where his research and teaching are in the archives area. Prior to Pratt, he was the Head of Technology for the Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College, Columbia University. He completed his doctorate from the Communication, Media andLearning Technologies Design program at Teachers College Columbia University, and BS in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside. You can find out more about him at his website: http://www.thinkingprojects.org.
