JISC

The business of HE/FE institutions is increasingly transacted by email and the management and preservation of stored email is an important part of an institution's records management process. Loughborough is probably typical of other institutions in that much of this email is sent from and received into email accounts that are assigned to individual staff members, and is thus filed and disposed of by individuals as they see fit.  At Loughborough email storage is is deleted when staff leave.  It is backed up for the purpose of disaster recovery but the backups are kept for a short period of time and not for archive purposes. 

This project is a case study of practices at Loughborough with outcomes expected to be widely applicable elsewhere. It developed policies for retention and disposal of email, examined current and possible practices for dealing with email at a corporate, department or group level rather than a personal level, and evaluated various technical options for archiving email in line with the policies and legal requirements.