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The Internet Data Storage

British Library Starts Email Archive 122

Posted by timothy from the what-about-peter-okoeguale dept.
sushi writes "Australian IT is reporting that 'The British Library is creating an archive to store the emails of the nation's top authors and scientists, as the written word is replaced by electronic messages.' A spokeswoman says it welcomes emails from prominent people in all walks of life. "We want people with a canon of work behind them," she says. The article also talks of the need to read data from (now) obsolete computing platforms..."
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British Library Starts Email Archive More

British Library Starts Email Archive

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  • First (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:32AM (#10554688)
    As the first post, I welcome my mail to be submitted to this archive...

  • "obsolute" computing platforms? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TAGmclaren ( 820485 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:32AM (#10554689)
    ok, who let that one through? :)

  • Let History Decide (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:33AM (#10554691)
    A spokeswoman says it welcomes emails from prominent people in all walks of life. "We want people with a canon of work behind them...."
    Actually, just as interesting would be emails from great people BEFORE they became great. And you can't know that ahead of time. Storage is cheap. It would probably be a good idea for them to accept email from EVERYONE and sort through it later.
    • Actually, just as interesting would be emails from great people BEFORE they became great.

      Absolutely. Think about artists for instance - many Brit artists these days are famous just for being controversial. The ones that are famous now will probably be forgotten about in the future, and I bet there are artists working today that won't be really appreciated until they are dead.

      • >To: tracey.emin@hotmail.com

        > Hi Tracey,
        > how's the work going?

        Fuck off! Haven't done anything this week. Can't be bothered.

        Saatchi brought a box full of my old rubbish yesterday. 20 thousand quid!!! What a twat!!

        > You on for going out tonight?

        Too right! Let's go get fucking wasted!

        Trace xxx
        • Man! That is funny as fuck. I wonder how many people here on slashdot actually get this joke?

          If you're not british and you get this, reply here...

          • If you're not british and you get this, reply here...

            I guess that would be me. For everyone else - here is the explanation. Tracey Emin is a sculpture artist who produces some very controversial works. Her work tends to produce intense hostility in the vein of "Thats not art!".

            Her most famous exploit was her award winning entry to the Turner prize - titled "unmade bed". Evidently, the artist awoke from a night of hard drinking and bad sex and looked at the mess around her. The inspiration was to take th

    • Re:Let History Decide (Score:5, Funny)

      by polecat_redux ( 779887 ) <(spamwich) (at) (gmail.com)> on Monday October 18, 2004 @05:15AM (#10554789)
      Dear Eva,

      I was pleased to see you at the potluck last night. Your casserole was fabulous - you'll simply have to share the recipe with me sometime.

      The Schmidts seem like very nice people. It's so wonderful to see such a happily married couple these days. I really do wish them all the best.

      Are we still on for the motor trip up to the city this weekend? I know this great little place that I think you'll just love. Anyway, I hope to hear from you soon.

      Lovingly yours,

      Adolf

    • It's already done (Score:1, Redundant)

      by poptones ( 653660 )
      Now the british government has an excuse for making ISPs keep those gigabytes of internet traffic records on all their users...
    • This sounds like a job for...

      Gmail.

    • Re:Let History Decide (Score:5, Funny)

      by blowdart ( 31458 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @06:27AM (#10554897) Homepage

      It would probably be a good idea for them to accept email from EVERYONE and sort through it later.

      Lets see;

      • Spam
      • Email from mother
      • Spam
      • Email from porn site subscribed to
      • Spam
      • Email form mother asking why you haven't replied
      • Spam
      • Rejection email from craigslist casual encounters
      • Spam
      • Email laughing at the penis pic you posted on craigslist
      • Spam
      • Email from your mother asking why you sent her a penis picture
      • Chain mail

      A good idea? Really?!

    • "Actually, just as interesting would be emails from great people BEFORE they became great. "

      Echelon explained at last...

    • Yes, we will mass-archive mail so that future generations might be able to filter out the spam.

  • Maybe I could help... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:34AM (#10554693)
    I could send them my punch card reader. I still keep some of my best pr0n on those cards.

    • Re:Maybe I could help... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:39AM (#10554710)
      Actually, it turns out that the idea of donating a punch-card reader (parent post) isn't offtopic, if you read the article. They are in fact trying to deal with a gigantic backlog of electronic data from machines from the 1960's which they do not currently have a proper means to decipher--such as the work of Donald Michie, the artificial intelligence pioneer, and World War 2 codebreakers. They have the computer data, and in some cases even the comptuers, but no way to do anything with it. Manuals cannot be found (and having never been officially published, are not easily locatable), and critical hardware is broken or missing.

  • Storage (Score:3, Funny)

    by Awol411 ( 799294 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:34AM (#10554695)
    Just have Google give everyone a GMail account. Then not only can you store all of their political and scientific mail, they can get targeted advertisements about who to vote for and for whats new in science

  • Text-To-Speech (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:39AM (#10554712) Homepage
    One good thing about digital archieve is the possibility to use text-to-speech software to read those emails to people with sight problems.

    • Re:Text-To-Speech (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I was thinking blackmail but that works, too.
    • Especially useful for the writings of Dr. Stephen Hawking!

    • Re:Text-To-Speech (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Triv ( 181010 )

      I don't disagree with the thought, but there's more to understanding a book than the words. Inflection, emotion and all those things that computer's can't quite do are critical to understanding and are even more critical to enjoyment of the text.

      It's because of this that, while text-to-speech software is ubiquitous, libraries and not-for-profits (Like these guys [mablind.org], for one) still hire people (or accept volunteers) to read books for the visually impaired.

      Like I said, I have nothing against what you're p

      • Granted, we aren't there yet.

        However, we WILL be there in the future. You have to understand, the library is doing this for HISTORICAL purposes.

        So basically the plan is to store the emails now, and in twenty or so years have an AI text-to-speech program read Stephen Hawking's get BIGGGGER pen!S and v1agra spam to any of our future children who happen to be born blind.
    • One good thing about digital archieve is the possibility to use text-to-speech software to read those emails to people with sight problems.

      Lots of Vogon poetry in your inbox?

  • An obvious choice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mv2s ( 729020 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:40AM (#10554717) Homepage
    A British author with a "canon of work" behind him? This guy [douglasadams.com] better be on the list.
    • I had something else in mind [hush-hush.co.uk]. ;-)

      Something a little more *ahem* revealing about the British culture. And stuff.

      You know?

    • Re:An obvious choice (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18, 2004 @05:08AM (#10554781)
      Don't worry. He's on the list. Any future email from Douglas Adams will be archived and stored in a secure chamber deep below the earth's crust. We've got Tolkein's address watched too (elfluva@hotmail.com BTW).
    • I think it's appropriate that the BBC are currently broadcasting more, unheard, Hitchhikers Guide. Visit the BBC's H2G2 site [bbc.co.uk] where you can hear the latest episode in 5.1 and find out more.

      It's recorded with mostly the original cast, and how beautiful the irony that Douglas Adams, for it is he, is voicing the part of Agrajag. Not bad for a dead man. I do hear the tax breaks are good though.

      /JE

  • As a scientist I'd just like to say (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Illserve ( 56215 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:43AM (#10554725)
    Store all my emails? um... no thanks? please?

  • Note to self... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:44AM (#10554727) Homepage Journal
    Put Gmail password in escrow with pointer in will.

  • First privacy complaint (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Brits are reading your emails. SHOCK AND AWE!!

  • New email comes to light (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:46AM (#10554733)
    Dear Tony

    It doesn't matter. we're not going into Eyeraq
    for the Weapons. We're after the oil....

    George

    >Dear George
    >
    >Do we really have the evidence to go to war in
    >the middle east? I only ask becuase our
    >intelligence people aren't really sure enough.
    >
    >Could it be that we're making a mistake?
    >
    >RSVP
    >
    >Tony

  • Example email (Score:4, Funny)

    by I7D ( 682601 ) <ian.shook@NOSPaM.gmail.com> on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:50AM (#10554747) Homepage
    >>>Light is a wave! I can prove it.
    >> No its not, light is a particle! I can prove it
    > You ninny!

  • At first thought, a bad idea. (Score:5, Funny)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:51AM (#10554749) Journal
    Then I thought of the Salmon of Doubt, the book of the scraps of electronic data found on Douglas Adams HDD. But his emails?

    Yes letters can be well penned, but is every author going to vainly CC: their emails to a library?

    Should they be digitally signed? Oh lawks, Micheal Jackson just emailed me and asked if he could use my toilet [goonies]

    Seems dumb to me. Email is such a throw-away medium.

    If Shakespeares SMS's were saved, would be citing:

    2 b r !2b tat s da qsn, wthr ts noblr n da mnd to sffr da slngs n arws f owtragos frtne,r 2 tk rms agnst a c f trbls n bi opresing, nd dem.

    Email is for email. Anyone know any good librarian pr0n sites?

    • Re:At first thought, a bad idea. (Score:5, Funny)

      by general_re ( 8883 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @05:33AM (#10554816) Homepage
      Seems dumb to me. Email is such a throw-away medium.

      What are you talking about? I'm not famous yet, but I do have a "canon of work" behind me - I am the author of such instant classics as The Xerox Will Be Offline From 3-5 PM Today and Your Workstation Is Scheduled For Replacement On 4/22 and Can't Meet You For Lunch Today, Something's Come Up Here. Someday schoolchildren will study these, that's how important and eternal they are...

    • Re:At first thought, a bad idea. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Azghoul ( 25786 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @08:32AM (#10555245) Homepage
      See, my first thought is that it's a wonderful attempt to create the same sort of archives we possess for well-known people of the last couple thousand years. Archived letters give us the only insight into the thinking behind their public works. Imagine how much less we'd know about Jefferson and Adams, for instance, if we didn't have the letters they penned to each other.

      You're right that email is often a less formal medium, but do you /really/ think your average Nobel laureate (heheh, average) is going to be using sms or leet-speak?

      I'm just a random anonymous guy and I can't stand to write such rot.

    • Re:At first thought, a bad idea. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Anyone know any good librarian pr0n sites?

      http://www.jessamyn.com/naked/links.html [jessamyn.com] - maybe not good, but definitely librarian-themed softcore pr0n.

      -Fanny Hill

    • Email is for email. Anyone know any good librarian pr0n sites?

      As a matter of fact, I do [jessamyn.com]. :) Alternatively, search for "librarian" on any porn search engines.

  • better then not doing it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rvr ( 15565 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:51AM (#10554750) Homepage
    I was visiting a special collections recently and they had letters from Kipling, T.E Lawrence and Einstein. There is nothing quite like the feeling of touching such documents (with white gloves of course). Reading an email of someone, like Feynman, would not be as interesting as a letter. Nevertheless, I am glad that they are doing this, it is better then not having such information. But something is lost when its not on paper.

    Write a letter to mom.
    • Can please explain how something is lost when its not on paper? In terms of the actual info I really don't see any difference. They only advantage that paper documents have over electronic ones is that you can read them away from a PC. However, I don't see how that makes a document more interesting.
      • In this context, what you're reading is a copy of the bits that made up the text of the message. Even a copy of a letter Chopin or other historical figure wrote gives a greater significance in that you see their handwriting; it reinfirces the fact that they were a living person once, not just a myth, or something in history books. The paper brings you closer to the figure, whereas you'd yawn at a computer printout of the text in some lousy Times New Roman or Arial font.

        Having said that, not many people
      • In terms of actual info, there's the author's handwriting. Writing style and typoes do give a text a certain amount of character, but not as much. Then there are the differences between how the author normally writes and the handwriting in the document, which can indicate emotion, caffeine, distraction, etc.

        Of course, these apply more to documents you are reading for historical value, not for things you are reading exclusively for the content.

    • Of course using _black_ gloves would likely bring the whole of Western literature crashing down around our ears.

    • I print out al emails thus saving them for posterity!
    • I have to agree that reading their emails would be interesting and a great insight to their private natures. More than that, though, I have to agree with:
      There is nothing quite like the feeling of touching such documents (with white gloves of course).
      Lovers of the written word have a very visceral response to actually handling the paper their favorite author touched and being able to examine the script.

  • Available email collections (Score:5, Interesting)

    by j.leidner ( 642936 ) <leidnerNO@SPAMacm.org> on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:51AM (#10554751) Homepage Journal
    Some of these are even available for research purposes. The HCI expert Ben Shneiderman is said to prepare the release of his personal email archive for research purposes. Another source of emails is the Enron corpus.

    For researchers in style or computational linguistics, the prospect of getting the hands on more people's INBOXes is mind-boggling. Eventually, I hope this will improve the horrible present-day interfaces to email.

    --
    Try Nuggets [mynuggets.net], our mobile search engine. Search for answers to your questions via SMS, across the UK.

  • Obvious observation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @04:51AM (#10554752) Homepage
    I'm sure this is something that laywers have wet dreams over.
  • My computing platform is so extrom, while yours is an obsolute piece of jenk.

    Obsolute: adj.; to be completely and absolutely obselete

    Extrom: please see "sense of humor"

    Jenk: n.; some guy I used to know that worked at the pharmacy, it probably wasn't his real name

  • humm (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mr._Hole ( 665558 ) <webactivex@@@yahoo...com> on Monday October 18, 2004 @05:28AM (#10554807) Homepage
    We can finally get proof that bill gates is knowingly running a monopoly. Steve: so billy what do you want to do today. Bill: plot to take over the world... wohahahah (sig) wohahahahahah Steve: billy that is what we do every night though.. Bill: whacks steve on the head. shudd up and keep lobbying against evil open source. It's stevey, stevey and the brain (gates). (END SIG)!

  • Excellent idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gguppi ( 822910 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @05:50AM (#10554838)
    I think this could be quite valuable indeed. Another thing that I would love to see is to have an index for scientific papers such as the excellent Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ [psu.edu] coupled with a moderated discussion forum like the one here at slashdot for discussion of the strong/weak points of each scientific paper. If well done, I think this would be a huge benefit to the research community.
    • We do already: they call it a conference. Not trying to be a smartass, but a paper presented to a good conference is peer reviewed, then presented to a bunch of people who are experts in the field. It is then discussed both formally and informally.
      • Indeed. And its great if you are at the conference and if you are one of the people informally discussing the paper. But an open electronic forum would be a completely different thing. Because if I come across an interesting paper now, I will have no way of finding out what people at the conference were thinking and saying about it. And even though the papers are peer reviewed I also will not be able to see what the reviewers thought were the strong/weak points of the paper. I just know that for one reason

  • Helping out (Score:4, Funny)

    by Erik Hensema ( 12898 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @05:51AM (#10554839) Homepage
    From the article:

    "We have one machine, belonging to evolutionary biologist James Lovelock, for which we don't have a power supply cable."

    I'm sending them a spare power cable of mine. Very hard to come by these days with all those modern wireless computers.

  • more general (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wikinerd ( 809585 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @06:06AM (#10554860) Journal
    The problem is more general, it is not only limited to emails.

    As digital storage becomes more popular, someday we will lose valuable historical data and information because we will be unable to read the digital code of some device.

    If a very big asteroid hits Earth and civilisation returns to its 19th century state, for example, and after some time the future archaelogists try to discover the pre-asteroid history of civilisation, they will have no idea what these chips and CDs and memories are! they will be unable to even think that these things contain information written by humans.

    There is a period in human history called "dark ages" (before the middle ages) because the historians know very little about it and we have found nearly no writings from that era. see: http://www.wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=Dark_Ages [wikinfo.org]

    • Re:more general (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 16K Ram Pack ( 690082 )
      some people think the same thing about some document formats.

      Let's say you've got a message that is n years old, where n is quite a number of versions ago, long enough that most people aren't using it, and you've lost your old copy of the reader, and the company in question don't care about you or got taken over and hard drives lost, then how are you going to read it?

      At least with things like the OASIS format documents, it's all there in zipped XML with all the formats publicly defined.

    • If a very big asteroid hits Earth and civilisation returns to its 19th century state, for example, and after some time the future archaelogists try to discover the pre-asteroid history of civilisation, they will have no idea what these chips and CDs and memories are! they will be unable to even think that these things contain information written by humans.

      Would it really be so bad if they can't figure out that these shiny disks littering the earth are free AOL subscriptions?

    • If an asteroid hits Earth, how likely is it that we'd end up with 19C civilisation? There are millions of copies of undergraduate lecture notes which contain enough detail to replicate 1960s technology, but probably fewer copies of good diagrams for steam engines.
      • If an asteroid hits us, we will not be able to retain a 1960s civilisation level because we will not have enough factories and infrastructure to support it and even if the knowledge is saved in the form of college textbooks etc, the people will have more interest to find food (An asteroid will change the climate so the farms will not produce enough food) rather than reading books they don't understand.
        • I wasn't saying that we would retain a 1960s civilisation level: just that a 1960s civilisation level seems more likely than an 1880s civilisation level.
    • still currently there is more written records made than ever before as well, the happenings in the world are more thoroughly documented than ever.

      and anyways.. storage is cheaper by the day too. choosing what you should store is harder though.

  • Steve, Did I leave my copy of GTA Vice City round at your house last night? I got a bit too wasted and can't find it at my place. See ya, Paul Davies

  • Atlas (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ronald Dumsfeld ( 723277 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @06:16AM (#10554874)
    I wish they'd listed more of the hardware they're having problems getting hold of or getting working. I found this [ukuug.org] about the Atlas, and I actually remember the Sinclair ZX-80 [nvg.ntnu.no]. Sure enough, as the site says they're sometimes sold on e-bay [ebay.co.uk]. Someone want to tell the library to get their bid in?
    • As the library [www.bl.uk] publish their email format and the article had the fellow's full name in it I've dropped him a email pointing him to here, and to ebay. Hopefully he'll post a list of what he needs.
    • ZX-80? Remember it? I've still bleeding got one! ...and no it's not for sale, I plan on inflicting it on my kids everytime they get stroppy about their PCs.

  • Linus (Score:3, Insightful)

    by physman ( 460332 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @06:19AM (#10554880) Homepage
    Why has no one suggested sending them Linus's e-mails? His message in the comp.os.minix newsgroup and discussions with Andrew Taunenbaum are infamous. And e-mails between himself and his lieutenants are also pieces of history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds [wikipedia.org]

  • Already been done (Score:5, Funny)

    by close_wait ( 697035 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @06:36AM (#10554916)
    I'm sure the NSA already has copies of all emails ever written, so the British Library just needs to ask them nicely....
  • Would this be the same British Library [www.bl.uk] that was going to archive the whole UK web [zdnet.co.uk]?
  • While we're talking about the British Library, it's worth mentioning that they've just redone their catalogue search facility, and it is now excellent (and it works in FireFox). You can search their entire copyright library for free here:

    http://catalogue.bl.uk/ [catalogue.bl.uk]

    You can even use the site to order offprints of articles, book chapters, etc. from their Document Supply Centre. Very, very handy.

  • They could do worse than to harvest (Score:4, Interesting)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @07:13AM (#10554976) Journal
    all of the +5 insighfull material from the /. archives. If /. comments were counted in the "cannon of work" for an author, some of us have truely extensive output. As for "famous", well, I got my 15 minutes of fame on slashdot....5 seconds at a time and so did you.
    • I kind of though of doing a google harvester, that would have gathered all the +5's from one person.

      (also, it's kinda annoying that slashdot only shows last 24 comments.. and that just about anyone with anything worthwhile to tell gets excellent karma quite fast)
  • I once heard that the British Library wanted to take a 'snapshot of the internet', every week for public records!
    • The National Archives in Kew, London - which administers the UK's public records system - currently archives a selection of British government websites on a weekly basis. Those sites which do not update frequently are archived on a 6 monthly cycle. The UK Government Web Archive can be found here [nationalarchives.gov.uk]

  • Isn't it funny... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nbert ( 785663 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @07:19AM (#10554994) Homepage Journal
    ...that humans firstly developed techniques to write thoughts down, traversing from oral to written societies. We know of conversations made 400 years ago, because people wrote them down (and stored them somewhere). Nowadays those correspondences are simply lost because your pst file is borked or your hdd crashed. Isn't that a cultural regress? I hope this library will save many interesting mails from vanishing, but I doubt that historians will have better sources in 400 years about the present than what we have about the 17th century.
  • This concept would be similar to a series of letters by a great person being published as a book.

    Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru [wikipedia.org] is one such example.
  • I'm sure the CIA still keeps archiving every email that Elvis keeps sending

  • archiving digital data (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Orp ( 6583 ) on Monday October 18, 2004 @08:07AM (#10555119) Homepage
    This subject touches upon the larger issue of effectively archiving
    digital data, period. I have given a lot of thought to this because
    I have been keeping a journal since I was 12 (I am 36) and while its
    contents will undoubtedly only ever prove important to me, I want it to
    be preserved. I still keep a pen-on-paper journal and occasionally spend
    a few hours scanning it in to TIFF images and burning them to CD-ROM,
    and occasionally backing those up to a data archival site.

    I save and archive all of my outgoing email and while a fair amount of
    it is 'background noise' it does serve as a reminder of what I've been
    doing with my life, the people I've known, my changing viewpoints, and
    fills in the gaps that the journal does not cover.

    I suppose it all boils down to whether you have anything interesting to
    say, regardless of whether it is in ASCII text or a quill dipped in ink
    on papyrus.
  • who is prominent enough to warrant archiving?

    Personally I think I'm great, but will the British Library?

  • Darth_Keryx: Granted I appreciate the need and motive to archive such (electronic) correspondance. But how shall that correspondance be stored?

    For years a project within the Library of Congress has been saving important sound recordings. Their medium of choice? Cutting records. Okay they don't fit in your iPod and the sound quality is like mp3 with 2bps sampling... but - and here is my point - they can easily and always be accessed even if technology gets hosed and protocols are rendered obsolete. (My disse

  • I don't have some of the very earliest ones, but I've got my incoming and outgoing mail archived on my HD and backed up, less spam, of course, back to 1997. I still use Eudora Lite 3.05 which can run from removeable media. So down the roads of time, if someone can dig up a box that can run/emulate Windows of any sort from 95 on and read a data CD, they can read my mail. Of course that is ignoring the problems of archivable media lifetime. Punch cards still sound like they would survive best.

    "Do the Righ
  • ...is, coincidentally, the fellow who runs the Vintage Computer Festival, just mentioned in Slashdot [slashdot.org]. That would be Sam Ismail, whose private data-recovery company is VintageTech [vintagetech.com].

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