The Baglt Packaging Standard for Interoperability and Preservation

BagIt is a simple, self-describing format for packaging related data files together which is gaining traction across many research data systems and research fields. One of its great advantages is in how it allows a community to define and document a profile on that standard-that is, additional requirements on top of the Baglt standard that speak to the needs of that community. In this paper, we summarize the key features of the standard, highlight some important profiles that have been defined by communities, and discuss how this standard is being used as part of the NIST Public Data Repository as a preservation format. We will compare and contrast the use of Baglt generally for enabling interoperability (e.g., for transferring data between two systems) and its use for preservation. We will then give an overview of the NIST Baglt profile for preservation as well as introduce a general-purpose MultiBag profile which addresses issues of evolving data and scaling to large datasets.