Do libraries archive mailing lists as part of their collection?

This question follows the recent question on collecting threads on internet forums and archiving microblogging: do libraries actually collect, catalogue, and archive mailing lists? Thre are throusands of mailing list archives and there are surely more-or-less-established formats, such as mbox. But just linking to an archive on the web or putting some archive on a server is no serious collecting and archiving. In practice one probably has to deal with broken messages, incomplete archives, duplicate messages etc. A library or archive should also do some basic cataloguing when collecting a mailing list archive (origin, time-span, topic area etc.). Is collecting mailing list archives actually practiced by some libraries or archives?

Jakob

digital-preservation
digital-archiving
internet
email

Comments

Answer by Mary Jo Finch

Since mailing lists contain personal information, questions of the Privacy Act arise. As government agencies, most libraries are restricted as to what personal information they can collect, how they collect it, and how they disclose it.

On a practical side, I am stumped in imagining what selection policy a library might create for this - what would they collect? how would they collect it? who would be expected to use it? how much time/money would it take to keep up-to-date and cataloged? and would redaction be required?

Comments

trevormunoz: I agree with the OP that mailing list archives seem like valuable records and I hope we will see an answer indicating that some institution is collecting this data. I would question what seems to be the basic assumption behind this answer that electronic mailing list archives are harder to accomodate or justify in the context of a selection policy than analog correspondence files. Given the size of mailing list archives, tools from e-discovery or digital forensics might be needed to protect personal info but libraries can & should adapt such tools so as to preserve valuable digital collections

Answer by Trevor Owens

In many cases, mailing list archives are public and online. I think there is a good argument for just rolling these up in web archives. We already have a fair amount of this kind of content in existing web archive projects, for example, here is a link to a W3C email discussion thread preserved in the Internet Archive.

One of the nice things about collecting content in this fashion is that you get both the content of the messages and various contextual information about how they were displayed in the original email thread archive.

As a little bit of a tangent, you might also be interested in the various archives of Usenet (its not the same as a mailing list but it shares some characteristics) that exist and some of the community tensions that arise around archiving what some people think to be ephemeral discussions.