New Email Archive Tool to Sift Literary Legacies
“The leather-bound diaries of a 19th-century high-school principal in southwestern India are helping change how archivists around the world handle email. As authors’ archives encompass fewer handwritten drafts and more digital documents, email remains a particularly sticky problem. That’s where the diaries, kept for 50 years by Sudheendra Hangal’s great-grandfather-in-law, come in. In 2004, when Mr. Hangal was working as an engineer for Sun Microsystems in India, he came across the journals in a trunk in his in-laws’ house in Dharwad, about 300 miles from Bangalore. He discovered that his wife’s ancestor was something of the Samuel Pepys of Southern Asia, documenting the momentous and the mundane from 1880, when he was 30 years old, until his death a half-century later. On the lined pages of the diaries, he recorded births and deaths, daily household life and the price of vegetables.” (via WSJ)
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