Chapter 4: Ingest and Curation

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the steps necessary to guarantee high quality data, documentation material and metadata so that they can be archived and provided to secondary users while ensuring data security and protection against loss and damage.

In ingest, several different actions are taken, such as format transformations, metadata enrichment and quality checks on data and documentation material, e.g., for completeness, understandability, consistency, plausibility and anonymisation. Changes to the metadata, data and documentation are documented and also stored. Different archive solutions and project tools are used to implement and document workflow procedures. Data is made accessible via different platforms and by different underlying legal agreements.

The chapter begins with topics which need to be clarified before starting with ingest tasks, namely the handover from pre-ingest to ingest; where ingest is situated in the OAIS model; and different kinds of data deposit agreements. Then, the main tasks in ingest are discussed, which are checks on metadata, data and documentation material. Finally, accompanying sub-tasks complete the whole ingest process, e.g., how to deal with updates/new versions, an adaptation of workflows if necessary and an exemplary checklist for ingest.