SIP Draft Specification

A Submission Information Package (SIP) is defined in the OAIS standard1 as an Information Package that is delivered by the Producer to the OAIS for use in the construction or update of one or more AIPs and/or the associated Descriptive Information. Many different SIP formats are used all over the world and unfortunately there is currently no central format for a SIP which would cover all individual national and business needs identified in the E-ARK Report on Available Best Practices.

Therefore, the main objective of this report is to describe a draft SIP specification for the E-ARK project – give an overview of the structure and main metadata elements for E-ARK SIP and provide initial input for the technical implementations of E-ARK ingest tools.  The target group of this work are E-ARK project partners as well as all other archival institutions and software providers creating or updating their SIP format specifications.

This report provides an overview of:

• The general structure for submission information packages.

This report explains how the E-ARK SIP is constructed by following the common rules for all other (archival, dissemination) information packages.

• The SIP METS Profile.

We provide a detailed overview of metadata sections and the metadata elements in these sections. The table with all metadata elements could possibly be of interest to technical stakeholders who wish to continue with the more detailed work of the E-ARK SIP implementation later.

Two examples with different kinds of content (MoReq2010, SIARD-E) following the common structure for EARK submission information package can be found in the appendixes to this report.