The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded an $857,027 grant to the Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop the ability to preserve email for future research use.
The four-year grant will support “Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community,” a program that will build the capacity for archives, libraries, and museums to collect and better preserve email as part of the historical record and in their research collections.
The program will solicit grant applications to fund projects of $25,000 to no more than $100,000 to be evaluated by a panel of experts, including humanities scholars, archivists, and digital preservation experts. All grantees of the program will share their knowledge back to their communities, to the profession as a whole, and to the public.
“Email preservation is a matter of intense public interest and speaks to the functions of public trust that archives and libraries uphold,” said Principal Investigator Chris Prom.
The official press release can be found at https://www.library.illinois.edu/news/grant-to-support-email-preservation-program.