Since they already archive regular correspondence, it was a natural for the British Library to begin archiving e-mail correspondence as well. Slashdot pointed me to a neat article about the pitfalls of trying to create an archive of a medium that is in constant flux: one of the computers in their collection can't even be turned on for lack of a power cable.

The article inspired me to search through my personal e-mail archives, which I blog about here. The most interesting tidbits were my first encounters with spam:

Back then, spam was almost an amusement; the quantities hadn’t become great enough for it to become a festering boil on the Internet. Now the British Library, in its efforts to preserve the great words of great people, will also be preserving their spam! V1Ag3a for Stephen Hawking! H0t Asian Babes for J.K. Rowling!

Interestingly, trying to find anything of real relevance in those old e-mails may also be somewhat like sifting through spam.

Sifting through correspondence has always been a bit of a dodgy task, but e-mail adds an extra dimension: not only does it record significant correspondence, but also the "spam" of history -- invitations to coffee, grocery lists, etc. But which entries tell us more about the writer -- the "official" ones or the casual slices of his or her life? Perhaps only time will tell whether the "important" e-mails are the ones we actually remember.