Hi all, We started our first online collecting project a few months ago and the most difficult issue that has arisen so far is how to handle emails. This is a big topic. It includes granularity (which we think we've resolved - each attachment, where there are attachments, is its own item, or file. Together, attachments and the email message make up a single "object" or "working group" of category "email").
Questions also include privacy issues: What policies to we present to people who give us collections of emails that they have received? How much scrubbing we do to ensure anonymity (or do we? the more anonymous the message, the less point there is to read it - once you've made all the names some equivalent of "jane doe" and all places "one main street" how much is left in some emails?)? For now, we are leaning towards go over each email after automated scrubbing and ensuring anonymity. We recognize that some messages just can't reasonably be made public. Questions that don't come up in this context are those related to Sarbanes-Oxley - our preservation issues with email do not map to the concerns businesses (including large non-profits) grapple with on this subject. Has anyone else been dealing with these issues? What have you decided, or what is guiding your policies? Thanks, Ari Davidow
