Where light in darkness lies: preservation, access and sensemaking strategies for the modern digital archive

The second decade of the 21st century finds institutions around the world increasingly having to cope with the matter of how to preserve electronic records in response to litigation, regulatory and compliance demands. In the public sector, existing approaches to email preservation in particular (based on past litigation) run the gamut from continued reliance on print to paper strategies; to deployment of disaster recovery backup tapes as default recordkeeping systems; to forms of electronic recordkeeping that continue to rely on end users performing records management functions; and most recently, to automated email archiving. This paper argues that with greater encouragement and adoption of automated capture
methods, archivists and historians should understand both the limitations of present-day search techniques, as well as the need to extract “meaning” out of what are increasingly vast amounts of electronic records, especially through consideration of new methods drawn from the disciplines of
sensemaking and visual analytics.