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British Library to Collect Significant E-mailsThe British Library has added culturally significant e-mails to the list of digital materials it archives. E-mails from the late English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes have already been added to the collection, and the library hopes to obtain the electronic correspondence of such luminaries as authors J. K. Rowling and A. S. Byatt and physicist Stephen Hawking.“E-mails are akin to telephone conversations,” Jeremy John, the library’s curator of digital manuscripts, said in the October 12 Australian. “We now have the opportunity to capture this information exchange, but I’m very concerned that we will lose it because the authors do not realize its significance.” Some authors who already donated e-mail collections to the library have specified that their names be kept confidential until after their deaths to avoid upsetting those with whom they have corresponded. The library stores digital materials in their original media (disks or hard drives) in a climate-controlled room behind metal doors to prevent the erasure of magnetic data, although John keeps duplicate files on CD-ROM in case the originals are corrupted. Some of the digital collection is available on a standalone computer in one of the reading rooms. Posted October 22, 2004. |
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