Hi, all,

A question came up about BagIt, and I thought I'd share some information. If anyone wants to chat further, I'm happy to.

-Kate

When people say BagIt, it's not always clear what they mean. It's generally one of two things:
1. The BagIt specification
2. Software written to help people make bags

== The BagIt specification ==
The BagIt specification describes a file packaging format ("bags") for storage and transfer of content and metadata.
A bag is a file system directory that contains at least the following:
 * a "data" directory that includes the data files that comprise the digital content being preserved
 * at least one manifest file that itemizes the filenames present in the "data" directory, as well as their checksums
 * a "bagit.txt" file that identifies the directory as a bag, the version of the BagIt specification that it adheres to, and the character encoding used for tag files

This video gives a good overview:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3p3ao_JSfo
The wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BagIt
The spec itself: 
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/documents/bagitspec.pdf

== Software for making bags ==
There are a bunch of tools available for making and working with bags. Some we maintain here at LC, some are made by other folks. I'll link to a few of the LC projects below:
https://github.com/LibraryOfCongress/bagit-java/
https://github.com/LibraryOfCongress/bagit-python
http://sourceforge.net/projects/loc-xferutils/files/loc-bagger/

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