Challenges of Appraising Records in the Digital Age | Smithsonian Institution Archives Over the last few years though, I've been asked to appraise electronic
files with increasing frequency. Suddenly, I'm not perusing filing
cabinets but sitting in front of a computer systematically clicking
through folders. Or I'm putting disk after disk into a drive. Files
are not always intuitively named, particularly if they were created at a
time when file names could only be eight character long. This results
in me needing to open the files to see what they are, but compatible
hardware and software are not always immediately available. An
organized folder structure allows me to make educated guesses about the
contents of the files, but it's not uncommon to find a single generic
folder to which all of the files have been saved.