Adopting a Packaging Specification in a Heterogeneous Digital Archive: Running a Tight S(h)ip

At iPRES 2026 in Copenhagen, meemoo presented a long paper on adopting a SIP specification in a heterogeneous digital archive and the lessons learned. To upscale its services, 1) meemoo introduced a SIP specification based on the E-ARK framework, 2) decoupled packaging from ingest and 3) facilitates self-service for different partner segments. To conclude, we highlight five key lessons learned through this process.

Introduction

Meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives, formerly known as VIAA, collaborates with organizations in culture, media and government to support the care and use of their (digital) archives. Specifically, we digitize and archive Flemish archival material for over 180 organizations, and assist hundreds of Flemish heritage organizations with the registration and management of their collections. We strive to make this valuable content as accessible and usable as possible in various ways.

Digital preservation is our core responsibility, which evolves constantly and has an ongoing increase in complexity. We started off as a digital archive for mainly audiovisual content, but currently safekeep much more than that, including digitized historical newspapers and glass plate photographs, 3D objects, or gigapixel images. Yet, meemoo doesn't own any of the archived material, nor has any copyrights. We are an organization that delivers preservation services to its partners in the cultural heritage and media sector without a transfer of rights. As an archive, this makes meemoo oddly customer-facing and in a difficult position to make process adjustments.

These services – covering the intake of both new digitization and existing digital assets – are organized to drive down cost through high-volume processing. Hence, scaling its operations under tight budget and human resource constraints is existential, yet a challenge. Since its inception in 2012, the activities or projects of meemoo multiplied, our collaborations expanded and our digital archive grew exponentially. The needs of our partners also evolved over time, while at the same time, the archive also became more heterogeneous and technically complex. In order to keep up, the ways in which material is ingested developed rather organically over time. This resulted in an ingest workflow that is very hard-coupled to our archiving system and involves a lot of manual interventions.

This high degree of dependencies prevented meemoo to scale services as they were, given the available resources. The solution, at least in some part, lay in an overhaul of the archive ingest pipeline and process in a way that improves input predictability, self-service and decoupling. In this paper, we describe how we approached these changes, which were technical as well as organizational. Essential is the introduction of a formal Submission Information Package (SIP) accompanied with tools for packaging, a standardized ingest flow, and a governance model.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. First, we lay out the core principles that support scaling-up ingest (Section 2). Next, we describe the design choices with respect to our SIP format (Section 3) and discuss its effects on our ingest flow and governance framework (Section 4). Then, we discuss how we use tooling to support customer self-service (Section 5). Lastly, we close with the lessons learned in this process (Section 6) and some conclusions (Section 7).