Australian Museum starts e-mail archive.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT - Powerhouse Museum - Brief article

Sydney, Australia's Powerhouse Museum is asking Australians to send it e-mails to be part of the country's first e-mail archive collection, according to ABC Online--Australia.

The museum hopes the collection will serve as a sort of time capsule reflecting Australian life in 2008. Scholars and researchers now can look to old letters to find out how people lived centuries ago. But today, letter writing has been largely replaced by electronic communication.

"We're concerned about the fact that in the future, if people are using e-mails, there won't be that same legacy of primary source material for future generations to know about what we were doing," said Matthew Connell, the museum's computing and mathematics curator.

The museum is working on the project with e-mail provider Windows...