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Academic Integrity

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Client

Virginia Cole, Olin-Uris Library Reference, vac11@cornell.edu.

Protecting individual privacy in archived campus email in the age of the Patriot Act

The objective is to create a system that would strip all personally identifiable information from archived email. Specifically, campus library reference departments receive and respond to hundreds of patron questions over email. Email questions and their responses are a content-rich text resource that cannot currently be utilized by library reference departments for other projects such as blogs, FAQ, statistical and qualitative analysis, etc., because of the personally identifiable information they contain.

Most campus libraries use Eudora for reference email. Both patron and staff personal information needs to be purged from both initial questions and the resulting responses. Personally identifiable information is routinely, but not always, found in addresses, headers, subject lines, greetings, salutations, and closing signatures. Thousands of email questions and responses have been archived by campus libraries.

Overall goal: To use the system on the archived emails in order to protect patron privacy for compliance with the Patriot Act and in order that purged questions and responses could be repackaged for other uses and manipulated with other technologies such as FAQ, blogs, wikis, statistical and qualitative analysis tools, etc.

The system could be of enormous utility to other Cornell individuals and departments (and Eudora users worldwide) who are faced with similar email archives.