For Immediate Release Friday April 1st, 2022
Artefactual Systems, the lead developers of the free and open-source Access to Memory and Archivematica projects, is pleased today to announce a new service offering: Digital Physicalisation as a Service.
Digital Preservation is lots of fun and everything but it can be very abstract and intangible. It’s not something you can really get your hands on. From today, all that has changed.
Introducing the Bag Bag!
The Bag Bag is a physical representation that conforms to the Library of Congress BagIt specification. Here’s how it works. You send us your digital objects, and metadata (don’t forget the metadata!), and for a fee (plus $4.01 shipping and handling), Artefactual will package your content in one of our stylish new Bag Bags.
These bag bags don’t just look great, they validate! Bag Bags are made from archival quality materials. All metadata files required by the BagIt standard are printed on the outside of the Bag Bag. Your digital content will be printed out and placed in a data folder inside the Bag Bag.
The bag comes in both zipped and unzipped styles.
We are working on supporting the 7zip format, but so far we have had trouble sewing all seven zippers onto the Bag Bags.
“We are very excited to bring this innovative new technology to market” says Kelly Stewart, Artefactual’s Chief Archivist. “I do recommend the zipped Bag Bags in particular. Stuff can fall out of the unzipped Bag Bags a bit too easily.”
Please note that at present we can only produce Bag Bags that contain the standard pictures from the images directory found in Archivematica sampledata repository. If you have other content that you would like to preserve, do get in touch.
Operators are standing by!
