Former Matrix Electronic Records Archivist Lisa Schmidt Publishes H-Net Case Study
Matrix is happy to announce the publication of “Preserving the H-Net Email Lists: A Case Study in Trusted Digital Repository Assessment” by former Matrix archivist Lisa M. Schmidt, currently the Electronic Records Archivist for Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections. This publication is the result of a two-year project to assess and improve the preservation of the academic email lists of the H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online consortium using the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC): Criteria and Checklist. In 2007, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) awarded a grant to MATRIX to assess the H-Net email list archives as a trusted digital repository. Matrix hosts the H-Net consortium on its servers. The H-Net email lists provide a record of more than twenty years of academic discourse on humanities and social science research likely to be useful to future scholars and thus worthy of preservation.
According to Schmidt, “The study of the H-Net email list system as a preservation environment marked the first formal application of the TRAC to email list archives and demonstrated the successful audit of a repository functioning as a live access system. Those who manage LISTSERV-based and other email lists containing scholarly discourse, such as JISCMail, and even list managers for lists that document less formal dialogue, such as the Society of American Archivists’ Archives and Archivists (A&A) discussion list, may find the results of this study useful in creating and improving the preservation practices for their list archives.”
“Preserving the H-Net Email Lists: A Case Study in Trusted Digital Repository Assessment” appears in the spring/summer 2011 issue of The American Archivist (74:1) and is available online from The Society of American Archivists.
