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The Palladium Project – innovations now available to all

18 Apr 2024

Manchester Library leads on development for Email Archives Software

The value of correspondence in archives has long been understood; letters convey information, provide evidence of decisions and views, carry traces of social relations, behaviours and attitudes, and offer insight into events by those who experienced them. They traverse the public and private, sometimes open and intended for dissemination, and sometimes for the eye of the recipient alone. Correspondence certainly forms an essential (and lucrative) part of literary archives. 

If the preservation of this essential genre of record is to continue, then the inclusion of email as a modern form of correspondence in archive collections is paramount. The first electronic mail exchange took place in the 1970s, and email has since become a vital and ubiquitous form of communication, used by over 3.9 billion people. Despite the preponderance of other electronic methods of communication that have since entered general popular use, email is the generally acknowledged frontrunner for official and professional communication.  

Since 2012 The University of Manchester Library has been acquiring the email archive of indie poetry publisher Carcanet Press. It has 3 accessions, the first two consisting of 300,000 items and the third which we acquired in 2020, of over 500,000 items.  

The email archive is preserved in our digital preservation system, Preservica, and in 2020 we introduced appraisal and management of the collection via the email archive software ePADD (email Processing, Appraisal, Discovery, Delivery). In 2019, we were successful in securing Arts Council England Designation Development Funding for a project called ‘Providing Access to Large Literary Archives in a Digital Medium’, or Palladium for short. 

 

The Digital Development Team & Special Collections are therefore proud to announce the release of ePADD version 11, which integrates enhancements developed by the University of Manchester’s Palladium project. New features include redaction, options for export to the Delivery module, and augmentations to the metadata export and correspondent’s functionality:

  • Redaction: Users can now redact specific text from messages in the Processing Module to restrict information at a more granular level. ePADD retains an unredacted version of all messages where redactions have been made so that archivists can refer back to the original text. 
  • Correspondent Merging: Found on the Correspondent Screen in both the Appraisal and Processing Modules, this feature allows users to more easily combine multiple correspondents in the address book. 
  • Permission Labels: Users can use this new type of label to identify a set of messages within a collection that they would like to make accessible in the Discovery or Delivery Modules. This label supports a common use case reported by users where they would like to make only a specific set of messages from a collection available to researchers. 

This project was carried out alongside our ongoing collaboration with Stanford and Harvard Universities on the development and maintenance of the ePADD software. We continue to be active members of the ePADD Steering Group and leading members of the ePADD Code Group.  

Thanks to the Palladium project, we have also created and implemented end-to-end workflows and new tools for the ingest of email archives, including the new management software ePADD. We have carried out development work to augment the software in multiple areas and have been successful in appraising 35,000 emails using ePADD from the Carcanet Archive. We have cleared over 3,300 emails for access using collaborative and individual appraisal approaches, and developed and implemented a new appraisal rubric. We consulted with academic colleagues at the University of Manchester to experiment with and produce a range of data visualisations as examples of what is possible with large, anonymised datasets via ePADD, Datawrapper and Gephi. 

We collaborated with two artists, Mary Griffiths and Gregory O’Brien, to produce creative responses to the Carcanet email archive, and these pieces will soon be displayed permanently on our digital exhibitions site, Manchester Digital Exhibitions. 

The project owes its success to the groundbreaking work of Jochen Farwer, supported by a strong collaboration between members of Curatorial Practices and the Digital Development Team, including Ian Gifford, Tom Higgins, Paul Carlyle and Jessica Smith. The changes will have international significance for the email archiving community, and we are excited to see the uses made of our innovations.