From this past Sunday's New York Times book review section:
"Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04DONADIO.html (registration required)

Excerpts:

"Today, a new challenge awaits literary biographers and cultural historians: e-mail. The problem isn't that writers and their editors are corresponding less, it's that they're corresponding infinitely more -- but not always saving their e-mail messages. Publishing houses, magazines and many writers freely admit they have no coherent system for saving e-mail, let alone saving it in a format that would be easily accessible to scholars. Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is arguably one of today's richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of correspondence that's increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace. "

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"Steven Kellman, the author of a new biography of Henry Roth, predicted the rise of e-mail correspondence would affect historians, not just biographers. ''Our understanding of the Constitution, for example, would be quite different if the thoughts about it exchanged by Jefferson, Madison and Monroe had vanished into the electronic ether,'' he said. "

Posterity may not care about a publisher's collected spam, or the personal messages employees routinely send from their work e-mail accounts -- which are, in any case, the property of the company, not the author. But the confusion at publishing houses over what and whether to save bodes ill for cultural historians. ''Memory is consummately, wackily unreliable, so that interviews can only serve up to a point; as per Rashomon, if I interview five different people about the same episode, I fully expect to hear five very different versions,'' Bailey said. ''Letters, however, give a more or less contemporaneous account with a lot of subjective nuance.''
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"Libraries are looking to the National Archives for guidance. In the coming weeks, the archives expect to award a contract to a company to develop a system that would preserve e-mail correspondence and other electronic records ''free from dependency on any specific hardware or software, potentially forever,'' Kenneth Thibodeau, the director of the Electronic Records Archives program at the National Archives and Records Administration, said. Writers' correspondence may be at risk, but it's nothing compared to what the federal government is up against."


Maarja Krusten
GAO Historian
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