I'd like to announce the release of a Python library for dealing with BagIt folder structures. This can be used either as a python library or at the command-line interface. It conforms to the 0.96 version of the BagIt spec.

http://github.com/ahankinson/pybagit

Documentation can be found here:

http://www.musiclibs.net/pybagit/

Some features of this library:
 - Can validate bag structures with both MD5 and SHA1 checksums
 - Can compress and uncompress bag structures in both .zip and .tgz formats
 - Can create and parse fetch file contents

I've included some code examples and some unit tests in the package to illustrate some of uses.

This is the first release of the software, so if you find any problems please let me know. It's being released under the MIT License and a Creative-Commons Attribution-only copyright, so please feel free to use it as you see fit.

I'd also like to send a nod out to Ed Summer's Python BagIt library, (http://github.com/edsu/bagit) which I just found this morning in preparing to write this email. Sorry for the duplication! When I started this project the only thing I could find was an older incomplete implementation by the LoC. If there's an interest in combining the two projects I would be more than willing to do so.

Cheers,
-Andrew