>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

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>> Hi everyone. So, it is just about 9:00. So we are going to get started. My name is Kate Murray and I work at the Library of Congress. I used to work at the National Archives. And on behalf of the conference organizing committee, which is myself, Erin Engle, Kevin DeVorsey and Bob Spangler, we would like to welcome you to the Archiving Email Symposium. Before I introduce our welcoming speakers, I'm going to go through some housekeeping. So, the first thing to notice is that we are in the Montpelier Room, and we are in the yellow corridor. We will be in this room all day. If you look at the agenda, and there's a note on the agenda I would like to talk about in just a second, we will have a morning break, an afternoon break, and a lunch, and we plan to end at about 4:30 today. The closest restrooms are if you go out this door, make a left, and the restrooms will be up on your right. There's also more restrooms further down in the red corridor. If you feel like you need some caffeine jolt for today, we are very close to the Library of Congress cafeteria, which is actually quite nice and has a lovely view. Right? And that's straight out those doors to your right. There's a Starbucks in there. We also have a Dunkin Donuts in the basement, which there was a great BuzzFeed article about, if you are ever curios about that. So that is actually on the ground floor. Our lunch hour today starts at noon and goes to about 1:15 and it is on your own. You can have lunch in the cafeteria. There is also a list of restaurants, local restaurants, in your welcome packet. Most of those are on Pennsylvania Avenue. You may want to leave enough time to come back because you will also have to go through security again when you come back into the building. At the back of the room there is a round table, which has some power strips on it, and also some more power strips over there, if you need to charge up your whatever, electronic devices you have. We have a Twitter hashtag because we're cool like that, and that is #archemail. At the -- all of today's talks, which includes a presentation, discussion, and questions and answers, will be taped and they will be made available to the public on the web at digitalpreservation.gov. And you can see the URL for that on our slide here. There is -- I mentioned earlier, there's a bit of a correction in our agenda. We accidentally made a mistake with our times, so the agenda should say that the Archival Perspective will be from 11 to 12 today. There's a little bit of a mistype there. But the Archival Persp - we'll have a break from 10:30 to 11. The Archival Perspective will come on from 11 to 12, and then we'll go to lunch.

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Also, we already have a lost and found issue. So if you lost a camera you can either talk to one of the four of us -- Kevin, Erin, Bob or I -- or you can go to the front desk where you checked in to pick up your camera. And let's have that be our lost and found station for the day. And finally, presenters, if you could come and sit towards the front before your panel starts. We'll have presenters come and talk, give their presentation, and then go sit back down. During our question and answer period, we will have all of our presenters sit up here. 

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And lastly, I want to give a huge thank you to our program committee, and you can see them listed here. They not only helped us shape the agenda, but also helped us contact people and we are very grateful for their participation. So now we're going to get on to the meat of our program today. We are honored and lucky to have two executives from our host institutions to officially open our meeting and give us some welcoming remarks. I would like to introduce these two individuals. Mark Sweeney is the Associate Librarian for Library Services here at the Library of Congress and Paul Wester is the Chief Record Officer of the United States Government from the National Archives and Records Administration. So I will turn it over to Mark.

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[ Applause ]
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>> Thank you, Kate, and good morning to you all. I am Mark Sweeney, the Associate Librarian for Library Services here at the Library of Congress, and it is my pleasure to welcome you for this Archiving Email Symposium, which is being hosted by the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration. Can there be a timelier or more important subject the nation's archiving community to address than this moment: Email?

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 I don't think so. To state the obvious, email has become ubiquitous in everyday life for most people. After verbal communication that takes place face to face or over a telephone or cell phone, email messages are arguably the most common mode of communication throughout the world today. And for some people, email is actually their predominant mode of communication in their lives. Another truism is that email messages we send and receive are cultural artifacts. They express, sometimes in ways that are unique to the medium, what is going on in all sectors of society. Therefore, as archivists, charged with the responsibility of collecting, preserving, and making available documents that powerfully reflect our activities, concerns and values of our time, dealing with email is not optional. It is an imperative. But the challenges, of course, are numerous. A few questions before us today are: How is email different from other digital content? How can we bring email into our collections? Are there donor issues that are specific to email? What are the legal issues about email that pertain to cultural heritage institutions such as ours? Are there standard preservation file formats that can be used for email? How can we make email that is part of collections available to searchers? What policies and technical solutions do we need?

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These and other compelling questions about email will be addressed during this symposium and I look forward to what emerges from the discussion. On a personal note, as a librarian and administrator at the Library of Congress, I can tell you that attention to email at this institution is growing steadily. Of course, we create our own email records as part of our daily business and we take them into account as part of our records management program. Also, because we are a collecting institution, we are beginning to address how to curate the email records that will undoubtedly show up in the collections of personal papers and other materials acquired by the library's numerous custodial divisions. 

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This afternoon, my colleagues from the manuscript division and the music division will get into this in detail. We, at this library, are very pleased to be hosting -- co-hosting -- this symposium with the National Archives, our great sister institution, and I also want to thank our program organizers, Kate, Erin, Kevin, and Bob, for putting together the program. And now, please join me in welcoming our colleague from NARA, Paul M. Wester Jr., NARA's Chief Record's Officer, the first Chief Record's Officer of the U.S. government. Paul --

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[ Applause ]
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>> Good morning everyone. 

>> [Audience] Good morning.

>> So, those of you who are taking pictures [Laughter] and hashtagging them out under archemail, before I do my Hillary Clinton jokes, I have two devices. Let it be known. [Laughter] I would like to welcome everyone here this morning for the symposium and for the program we are going to have here all day today. As you might imagine, email is a topic that is consuming us at the National Archives. It is causing us to think differently about a lot of the challenges that we are facing, both within our institution and across the entire federal government. I know that there are a lot of folks here from the National Archives here today, as well as from other federal agencies, and it is very exciting that you are all here in the room to share practices, experiences, challenges; but I'm really excited that we have a lot of different people here from other institutions, other higher education institutions, other organizations that are very interested in the email challenge and thinking about it differently. Later this month, I'm going to celebrate my 25th year at the National Archives and when I started we had no email. In 1995 we then got email. We were printing out the email and filing it in paper file folders and putting them into cardboard boxes and sending them out to the Washington National Record's Center. And we have hundreds, if not thousands, of cubic feet of that material that will eventually come to the National Archives and we will be making that available in very different ways than we have done it in the past. I am looking at my colleague, Leslie, out in the audience. We are going to probably digitize it and, you know, everything becomes new once again. So, let that be a cautionary tale as we talk about other technologies in other symposiums in other times. So, my colleagues wanted me to talk a little bit about the past, the present, and where we are going to in the future. So, in the past we were printing and filing it. We went through lots of discussions about whether this stuff was actually record material and other kind of archival angels on a pinhead, as I like to say, discussions. We've embraced the notion that this material is record material and needs to be managed. We have been very active at the National Archives with OMB, with the White House, with other federal agencies across the government to really fundamentally change how we think about electronic records, and email in particular. We have an OMB directive that we are carrying out across the government where all agencies are going to be required to manage their email electronically -- imagine that -- by the end of 2016, and to manage all of their electronic records that have permanent value by the end of the decade in electronic ways.

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So we have really done a lot of great work in kind of setting the bar where it needs to be set to be able to have success in managing these kinds of materials. Most importantly, though, going forward we need to think differently about how to manage this content. We spend a lot of time doing things in manual ways. We may -- it may be electronic, but it is still kind of manual, and what we need to figure out how to do, and I expect the kinds of things we will hear about today is how can we automate these processes? How can we think about preservation issues and be able to ensure that these materials will be here and made available for future generations? You are going to hear of some work that we've done with the Presidential Records Act email materials and you are going to hear about some of the automation work we've done there, which has been very, very successful over the last several administrations. And we need to translate the lessons that we have learned from that experience and others into the federal records management federal space. And you will hear more about that as well. So, one of the things I wanted to do is have the colleagues from the National Archives please stand up.

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I want to give them a big round of applause.

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[ Applause ]
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They are the ones that are doing a lot of the new thinking and the new approaches that we are having towards managing email and developing the technologies that we need to have in place to make the email management work more effectively in the federal government and ensure that preservation can happen over time. 

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A group of folks from our electronic records division at the National Archives recently won an Archivist Achievement Award for developing new tools to kind of parse different kinds of electronic records, including email records. And we're very excited about the work that they have done so that it will allow us to bring in records into the National Archives. Kevin DeVorsey and his team, Don Shalvont's [Assumed Spelling] here. He has worked tirelessly one format issues, particularly with email records to be able to tell agencies what they need to do to bring those records into the National Archives. And he has also been working on metadata standards so that agencies know what to do around metadata so that we will be able to bring those records in and preserve them and make them available for future generations. So,

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I just wanted to, again, thank the Library of Congress for co-hosting this event and Mark and his great staff here, and then Kate and Erin and Bob and Kevin, who I think are hiding behind the post beyond, thank them for the great work that they have been doing in organizing this symposium. I have to be honest, they have been working on this for close to a year, and if they had been working on it starting at, you know, the beginning of March, I probably would not have agreed to come here because I'm really getting sick of talking about email. [Laughter] But it -- as Mark said, it is an important issue and yes, Arian, it is not dead. You can write that down, too. It's a really important issue for both of our institutions and for the entire federal government and for cultural institutions in the United States and around the world. So the more that we can spend time together thinking through the challenges, identifying solutions that work, discarding the ones that don't, and start thinking differently about this issue, we're really going to have a lot of success. So I want to wish everyone a wonderful day and looking forward to hearing some of the presentations this morning. So, thank you very much.

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>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.