Carcanet Press Email Preservation Project - Phases 2-3

Phase 1 of the Carcanet Press Email Preservation Project was a seven-week JISC-funded project which was completed in May 2012. During this period, The University of Manchester Library acquired its first substantial ‘born-digital’ archive, in the form of email generated over an 11-year period by Carcanet Press, one of the UK’s premier publishing houses; the Press’s archive is one of the Library’s most important modern collections. This funded phase of work enabled us to develop some key workflows and technical processes to ensure the basic long-term preservation of Carcanet Press’s digital archive. While much was achieved during that initial seven weeks, there was much which could not be covered in such a short space of time. Phases 2-3 of the project (which ran from July 2012 to February 2014) aimed to take the work forward, and were carried out by Library staff without the assistance of external funding. This report outlines that work, outputs of which include: a series of formal workflows for processing and managing email in PST format; a 120-page manual fully documenting every stage of processing and preservation work; full content models; metadata profiles and templates; a library of code; some initial experiments in visualising data; and a large body of digital archive material preserved to the highest standards, comprising 282,375 digital objects in total. The project report for Phase 1 of the project – which provided the foundation for our later work – is also available in Manchester eScholar (ID 165096).