Ingest
The ingest phase of the digital content life cycle involves the deposit, acceptance, and enhancement of the content and culminates in (1) the repository specifying a set of materials to be preserved for the long term, and (2) the repository making the resource available with all of the information necessary to understand and use it.
Community Standards and Practice
The ingest phase is the OAIS entity that contains the services and functions that accept Submission Information Packages from Producers, prepares Archival Information Packages for storage, and ensures that Archival Information Packages and their supporting Descriptive Information become established within the repository.
ICPSR's Approach to Ingest
Ingest covers the lifecycle stages of selection and appraisal (based on the Collection Development policy and criteria), acquisition (with the Deposit Form serving as a Submission Agreement), and processing (quality control) followed by the generation of the AIP for Archival Storage.
For repositories that ingest static unalterable content, like many libraries, the ingest process may be fairly simple. For some of the social science archives, the process may involve more work.
At ICPSR, ingest involves the following important data curation steps:
