BagIt celebrates twin milestones

If two digital archives have been exchanging digital content in the past five years, chances are they were using “BagIt”, a file packaging format that’s extremely popular in cultural and scientific data archiving. BagIt is a standard for moving data around inside virtual “bags”.

Created a decade ago by the California Digital Library (CDL) and the Library of Congress (LC), BagIt 1.0 was officially released last October as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specification. The need for BagIt arose from a requirement to safely copy terabytes of data from CDL to LC under a preservation and web archiving grant known as “The Web-at-Risk”. The recent BagIt at the Library of Congress blog post gives a more in-depth account of events leading to the two milestones achieved in 2018: BagIt’s tenth anniversary and its ratification by the IETF.