Launching the new Shared ePADD Discovery Module

The ePADD Project Team and the ePADD Discovery Consortium is excited to announce the launch of a new shared ePADD Discovery website! ePADD, the free and open source software for appraisal, processing, and providing access to email archives, developed by Stanford Libraries provides a stand alone email Discovery Module that can be hosted on a public web server. Adapting the former ePADD Discovery Module to facilitate the participation of other institutions was one of the primary goals for our Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded grant project.

ePADD’s Discovery Module allows institutions to publish a redacted view of their processed collections. This redacted version displays automatically extracted and user generated metadata about their collections, including collection summaries, entities, correspondents, and redacted email header information. While any institution that uses ePADD to process their email collections can set up their own instance of the Discovery Module, the ePADD team saw a clear need for a shared, multi-institutional version of the Discovery Module. Beyond providing a platform for more institutions to publish their email discovery metadata, we believe that aggregating email metadata in this way will facilitate researcher use and raise greater awareness of email as a primary source for archival research.

The new shared ePADD Discovery Module allows researchers to browse and search across metadata of email collections held at different repositories. This functionality will allow users to uncover connections between collections. In addition to the Stanford Special Collections and University Archives collections hosted on the site, the Hayden White email archive from the University of California Santa Cruz is also displayed. Each contributing institution also has an individual page displaying information about their repository, including a short description, contact information and links to their main website.

If you use ePADD to process email collections at your institution and would like to display your collection metadata on the shared ePADD Discovery Module, please contact us at epadd_project@stanford.edu and consult our Contributor Guide for more information.