Archival Information Package (AIP) Formats and Restrictions

Within the overall strategy of E-ARK the AIPs have a small but highly significant role. While SIPs have to be created by all archival systems to be used within individual solutions, and DIPs have to be deployed in all environments, the conversion between the three pan-European formats for information packages (SIP ==>AIP ==> DIP), has to be realized only once, leading to significant savings. The structure of the E-ARK AIP has therefore not to be derived from individual implementations of existing technology providers, but from the major abstract concepts currently existing. This report examines and describes these concepts and derives recommendations from them, which will be used as a guide line in the next step, the design of the pan-European AIP format and the conversion tools supporting it

GAP report between E-ARK requirements for access, and current access solutions

This report is a GAP analysis between current access services and user requirements for Access. It describes the landscape of access services today and highlights the results of the examinations of user needs for access services. The study targets the producers of the access services (service providers and archives), the clients of these services (archives) and the end-.‐users of them (third-.‐party users, the archives and the content providers themselves). This GAP analysis report can be read by readers uninvolved with the E-ARK project to gain understanding of the current situation and assess their own solution(s)

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