The British Library Hasn’t Called Yet
Via Slashdot, we learn that the British Library is creating an archive to store the emails of the nation’s top authors and scientists.
Emails from literary figures such as Ted Hughes, the late English Poet Laureate, will form a new digital archive alongside the library’s collection of paper correspondence, which includes love letters written by Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas. Curators have become concerned that conventional letters are becoming increasingly rare as writers and scientists abandon paper for more perishable email.
Among the people they want to store are J.K. Rowling, A.S. Byatt, Alastair Campbell and Stephen Hawking. I’ll bet that Rowling’s inbox is fascinating: 3.6 million emails that amount to “i luv H potter!!!! he is the r0×0r!!!” There’s no mention of the details of database back-end, but I’ll bet they’re not using Microsoft Access.
