This repository holds information about the Archival Information Package (AIP) format specification maintained by the DILCIS Board (http://www.dilcis.eu).

Key objectives of this specification are:

• To define a generic structure of the AIP format in a way that it is suitable for a wide variety of data types, such as document and image collections, archival records, databases or geographical data.
• To recommend a set of metadata related to the structural and the preservation aspects of the AIP as implemented by the reference implementation (earkweb).
• To ensure the format is also suitable to store large quantities of data.

The target group for this document are archivists, archival institutions, or people responsible for repositories of archival records that want to use the AIP format to store information packages for the long term. Alternatively, the AIP format can serve as an export format for information packages which contains the complete provenance of submissions (SIPs) over a period of time.

In this repository you may find an "examples" folder that holds examples of AIPs, and a "specs" folder containing the source files of the specification document.

You may also find issues found on the documentation submitted by implementers of the specification. This issues will be reviewed by the DAS Board and will be taken into account during the review process of this specification.

Final versions of the specification are published on the DILCIS Board web site.

The most up-to-date version is the AIP specification is the one in markdown format in this GitHub repository.

See Markdown documentation regarding how to edit Markdown documents.

Previous versions of the specification are available on the archive folder.