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Submission Agreements: Glossary of Terms

Draft: Subject to Change

Archive
The organizational unit accessioning the records from the producer. The archive is normally responsible for preserving the records it accessions for an extended period of time (often permanently). The archive is responsible for administering a preservation environment, in our case the Tufts Digital Repository which is Fedora-based, http://www.fedora-commons.org/.

Producer
The organizational unit or individual that has the authority to transfer records to an archive. Usually the producer is also the records creator, the organizational unit or individual that created and managed the records during their active use.

This is not always the case, sometimes the producer is different from the records creator.

For example: An author dies and her literary executor gains the authority to transfer her papers to an archive. The author is the records creator and the literary executor is the producer.

For example: Department X gets reorganized out of existence and Department Y, which takes over the functional responsibilities of Department X, gains the authority to transfer the records of Department X to the archive. Department X is the records creator and Department Y is the producer.

Counter example: The Department of Widget Science transfers some of its own records to the archive. The Department of Widget Science is the records creator and the producer.

Records Creator
An organization unit or individual that creates records and/or manages those records during their active use.

Ingest Project
The set of work involved in a producer preparing a group of records for a transfer to an archive, the transfer, and the archive accepting the records. An submission agreement usually represents a single ingest project.

Submission Information Package (SIP)
"An Information Package that is delivered by the Producer to the OAIS for use in the construction of one or more AIPs." From Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) page 1-13. Essentially it’s the records, bundled with appropriate metadata, packaged and prepared by a producer in a manner that an archive can accept.

For example: A producer transfers to an archive 100 tif image files, with an inventory that matches the image file names, technical metadata about the image files, and descriptive metatdata describing the images. That bundle of stuff is a SIP.

Archival Information Package (AIP)
"An Information Package, consisting of the Content Information and the associated Preservation Description Information (PDI), which is preserved within an OAIS." From Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) page 1-7. Essentially it’s the records, including all of is component parts and its associated metadata that an archive preserves in its preservation environment.

For example: The archive ingests the 100 tif files and associated metadata, creates full-size and thumbnail jpeg versions of the tifs, and migrates the inventory and technical and descriptive metatdata into its standing metadata standards. That bundle (the reconfigured metadata, the tifs, the full jpeg, and the thumbnail jpeg) all together is a AIP.

In Fedora terminology that bundle as a whole is a digital object and the individual components are data streams.

Dissemination Information Package (DIP)
"The Information Package, derived from one or more AIPs, received by the Consumer in response to a request to the OAIS." From Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) page 1-10. Essentially its the records, bundled with appropriate matadata, packaged and prepared by an archive and delivered to a user.

For example: An archive delivers jpegs versions of the 100 tif images along with descriptive metadata to users.

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