Data-Driven Reporting and Processing of Digital Archives with Brunnhilde

Abstract

[Excerpt] Archivists are now several decades in to appraising, arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to digital archives and have developed and adopted a number of tools to aid in specific tasks along the way. This article discusses Brunnhilde, a new tool developed to address one of the first steps in working with born-digital materials: characterizing the overall contents of directories or disks to enable smart evidence-based decision-making in the appraisal, arrangement, and description processes.