Penn State's Digital Stewardship Program is an institutional initiative to address digital content and data management needs in areas such as digital library collections, scholarly communications, electronic records archiving, and e-science/e-research data management. Building on existing services and infrastructure, the program is developing an interoperable and extensible suite of discovery, preservation, curation, archival, and storage services.
One of the stewardship program's projects is a prototype web application providing lightweight curation services. Objects ingested into this application will be stored as bags on disk, so we expect to accumulate a sizable number of bags in the coming years.
Previously we have discussed bilateral bag replication services with the University of North Texas, primarily for far-off-site disaster recovery purposes. We see some benefit of tackling cross-institutional replication at the bag level, rather than at the file level, in case we should ever need to interoperate with one another's content. Some of these less clear but nonetheless attractive services might be around discovery or publishing of bags by end-users on the open web, such as those detailed in the NDNP use case.
Thus, we're keenly interested in a low-barrier method of replicating bags to and from partners in a bag interop network.