The British Library is now appealing to Britons for their e-mails. The library wants to create a ‘snapshot of British life in 2007', with e-mails included.
The library is calling it the ‘E-mail Britain' program, and they're asking anyone from Britain who has an e-mail address to search their inbox and sent mail folders to find any e-mails that glimpse at their love, their travels, their complaints, their jokes – any email that is significant or mundane, dull or exciting. They're searching for anything to help paint the picture that is Britain in 2007.
“We're seeing it as an electronic time capsule, if you like,” Jonnie Robinson said, a curator for English Accents and Dialects at the library. “At the moment, we have all sorts of ways of tapping into contemporary culture and finding out things about what's going on and how people are managing relationships, but in 20, 30, 40 years things will have moved on and it will be a great snapshot of 2007.”
The emails are going to be collated and indexed by Microsoft, makers of Windows software and the Xbox, who has previously partnered with the library to digitize books from it's archive.
Personalized data and sensitive information will be edited out, of course, and the e-mail addresses off all will be removed.
For more information head over to http://www.newhotmail.co.uk/emailbritain/ or you can email the project directly email@emailbritain.co.uk
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