n.an entity that provides information to a digital archivesOCLC/RLG 2001, 9The OAIS operates in an environment formed by the interaction of four entities: producers, consumers, management, and the archive itself. Producers supply the information that the archive is tasked with preserving.CCSDS 2004, 7Producer: The role played by those persons or client systems who provide the information to be preserved. This can include other OAISs or internal OAIS persons or systems.Forstrom 2009, 476, fn. 71In the context of OAIS, ingest includes services and functions that accept Submission Information Packages (SIP) from producers and transforms them into one or more Archival Information Packages (AIP) for long-term retention.Lee and Tibbo 2011, 161A similar approach is reflected by numerous digital curation education and research initiatives—in North America, the UK, and elsewhere—that focus on active engagement with the producers of digital materials, whether they are scientific researchers, artists, government officials, or others whose activities are important to document over time.O’Meara and Tuomala 2012, 93Both the theoretical and practical perspectives of digital preservation address the need to involve the records creator or producer during the “active phase of the life cycle” (as it is called in the OAIS model).Lavoie 2014, 9Producers are the individuals, organizations, or systems that transfer information to the OAIS for long-term preservation. Negotiation with the OAIS specifies the content and associated metadata the Producer will supply, which is then submitted to the OAIS via an ingest process that accepts the submitted data and prepares it for inclusion in the archival store.
