The Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community (EA:BCC) is a multi-year initiative sponsored by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that brings together, supports, and funds a growing network of institutions and professionals working to develop critical solutions for preserving email.

Three new institutions were recommended for funding following a second round of proposals: the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the 92nd Street Y. An overview of these institutions’ programs is found here. Each project will use community-supported tools to process and provide access to email while demonstrating the value of email collections for humanities, social science, or other research. 

Nearly $400,000 was granted to the recipients in the first round to demonstrate and build capacity for a variety of archival institutions to process, preserve, and provide access to email using community-supported tools. Harvard University, University of Albany SUNY, Council of State Archivists, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago Library were among the five grantees in the first round. Read more about these individual projects here.

Through these two rounds of funding and nearly $650,000 allocated across eight institutions, EA:BCC continues to expand the email archiving network and provide resources and solutions for continuous development. 

As EA:BCC approaches its second year, there have been developments in email archiving software and capacity-building efforts. To learn more, please visit the “Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community” project website at emailarchivesgrant.library.illinois.edu.