In my final post as a METRO Fellow, I’d like to share the written work I developed with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Guggenheim Museum to address the collection of institutional email records. During the reverse pitch process, both sites came forward to request assistance with what they identified as a ‘problem record.’ As a performing arts venue and an art museum, these two institutions operate on similar cycles of exhibitions/performances, during which high-value institutional records are regularly created. Although both have had similar goals for realistic incorporation of email into record management schedules, they offered differing examples of scale and staff management which suggested an opportunity to consider a cross-organizational framework for email archiving.
In contrast to a traditional residency, the documentation you’ll find below examines how working with two institutions exposed trends in producer habits as well as differences in collecting needs.
This report was written with Tali Han, Associate Archivist at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as well as Evelyn Shunaman, Processing Archivist with the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Continue reading “Collecting Institutional Email: Results from Two Case Studies”
