Enhancing ePADD with Preservation Functionality - ePADD+

Digital Preservation Services is delighted to announce a new collaborative project between Harvard University, the University of Manchester, and Stanford University to enhance our collective capacity to archivally acquire, process, preserve, and make available email collections. As critical documentation of life in the digital age, the preservation of email is central to the mission and values of archives and archivists. This project, entitled Integrating Preservation Functionality into ePADD, or ePADD+ in brief, will integrate long-term email preservation functionality into Stanford University’s open-source email archiving software program, ePADD. The enhanced product will provide the digital archiving community with a tool comprehensively supporting the full email archiving lifecycle more robustly. 

“Email is clearly one of the defining information sources of the 21st century, and is indispensable to culture, commerce, and education. The work of the ePADD+ project will significantly enhance our ability to ensure ongoing access to email collections by future generations of scholars, policy makers, and others needing to understand the past,” says Stephen Abrams, head of the Harvard Library’s Digital Preservation Program and Principal Investigator for the ePADD+ project.

The 18-month project was generously awarded $100,000 through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community (EA:BCC) program. EA:BCC is a re-grant program administered through Illinois and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that seeks to build email archiving capacity in archives, libraries, and museums. The proposed activities are a direct outcome of recommendations from The Future of Email Archives report, also funded by the Mellon Foundation, which emphasizes the importance of better interoperability and integration between the many disparate email archiving tools that have surfaced in the digital archiving community. 

“The University of Manchester Library is delighted to be a co-partner in this international collaborative venture to augment the ground breaking work of both Harvard and Stanford Universities in the field of email archives. The ePADD+ project represents an important next step in the development of integrated tools to support the processing and preservation of email archives and will significantly benefit those engaged in this field of work within the UK and internationally,” Christopher Pressler, John Rylands University Librarian and Director of The University of Manchester Library. 

Because the requirements of preservation infrastructure and workflows vary greatly across institutions, the enhanced ePADD will support functions for local customization and extensibility. The three project partners will each utilize this capability to configure ePADD for their different organizational contexts. The software development activity will align with open-source best practices in order to support wider community contribution to ePADD and better software sustainability.

“As our current extended ePADD+ team tackles preservation, the next component of the curation lifecycle for email archiving, Stanford Libraries Department of Special Collections is looking forward to consulting with Harvard University and the University of Manchester on this crucial cycle of work for the ePADD Project,” Glynn Edwards, Assistant Director, Special Collections, Stanford Libraries. 

For updates on the ePADD+ project: