Best Practice: SIP specification, records export requirements, transfer and ingest

This report provides an overview of the current situation of the digital archiving best practices. Special attention is placed on archival ingest workflows, submission information package formats used for transfer and ingest of digital objects and their metadata. Records export best practices are covered as well.

The report consists of the following parts:

• introduction;

• description of the methods used for the analysis;

• overview of the results with short descriptions of practices, standards and tools;

• recommendations for the E-ARK project;

• appendices (the survey questions, an assessment of the interviewed stakeholders, the questions

from the qualitative interview and a terminology list).

The study concentrates on the following topics from the archival workflow:

• Records export (Pre-Ingest workflow steps);

• Steps in Ingest workflow;

• Submission information packages (SIP) used.

Highlighted points of this best practice report for E-ARK work are:

• One high-level (pre-) ingest workflow is proposed in section 4 which consists of 4 phases of the PAIMAS methodology, but several existing workflow parts must be examined more deeply to include the common steps to the E-ARK archiving workflow;

• E-ARK needs to develop detailed and commonly understood requirements for the records export

process which include procedures for data selection, extraction, metadata mapping, validation and quality control as these are currently lacking;

• One high-level SIP structure is proposed in section 4. (Recommendation for further work), but several existing SIP physical and logical structures must be examined more deeply to include the common aspects of formats used at archives into the E-ARK SIP specification.