2.2. Email archives

David A. Kirsch, University of Maryland, College Park

David A. Kirsch is Associate Professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the College of Information Studies (by courtesy) at the University of Maryland, College Park. 

Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham, UK

Stephanie is Professor of Strategy at Birmingham Business School (UK) and co-editor-in-chief of Business History and Co-Vice Chair for Research & Publications at the British Academy of Management. 

Adam Nix, University of Birmingham, UK

Adam is an Assistant Professor in Responsible Business. His research focuses digital-era business history, organizational email, and understanding misconduct and corruption as organizational issues

Shubhangkar Girish Jain, University of Maryland, College Park

Shubhangkar Girish Jain is a student in the Masters of Information Science (MSIS) program at the University of Maryland, College Park. 

Description of workshop 

Emails are materially different from correspondence of the pre-digital age, but their significance as traces of the past is substantial, especially for organizations, where email is not only used as a form of correspondence but also as an informal mode of record keeping (Moss, 2012). We proceed from the assumption that the preservation of a meaningful, relatively complete email archive is one plausible pathway to supporting scholarly research on organizations (Kirsch, 2009). Preservation is only one part of the problem, as the way these materials may be accessed and ultimately used for research is also critically important.

This workshop will (1) introduce “digitally curious” historians to the use of email collections as contexts for research (Talboom & Underdown, 2019), (2) orient scholars to the issues inherent in using email collections, and (3) provide a forum for scholars to share and learn from each other about emerging best practices in the use of email as a context for research.