Stage content for ingest
To preserve digital content in ADPNet, the content must be staged for ingest. That means making it available on a web server. The staged content should be accessible to ADPNet preservation nodes; it does not need to be available to the public web. Staging content for ADPNet servers to harvest is the method by which content is ingested into the digital preservation network.
Procedure
This section is now obsolete (as of April 2022). ADAH uses, and ADPNet strongly recommends, the use of the ADPNet Drop Server for staging content for preservation. This server is available to all network members. Documentation should be updated soon.
The best way to stage content currently depends on the details of your local web server setup. Here's how we do it at the Alabama Department of Archives and History as of June 2019:
1. We have a public web server, archives.alabama.gov. There is a subdirectory provided by this web server at http://archives.alabama.gov/Lockss/ which is set up to be visible only to the IP addresses of LOCKSS preservation nodes on ADPNet. Anyone else who browses to that subdirectory will see an HTTP 403 Forbidden error. (We used IIS's access rules to set up limited access to this directory. If you need help setting up a limited-access subdirectory on your own web server, contact the Technical Policy Committee for assistance.
2. New content is staged as a subdirectory uploaded to http://archives.alabama.gov/Lockss/ . We use FTP to create a new subdirectory on the web server, for example http://archives.alabama.gov/Lockss/WPA-Folder-01, and then transfer preservation copies of all of the content for that Archival Unit to the subdirectory. Files can be any format and can have any name, as long as none of them is called index, index.html, or any other file name with "index" before the extension (for example: don't use this technique to stage a file named index.php, index.htm, index.asp, index.cfm, ...).
3. Next, we upload a manifest file named manifestpage.html to the same subdirectory, which includes a permissions statement and a link to the directory listing (for example http://archives.alabama.gov/Lockss/WPA-Folder-01).
4. Once the manifest file is uploaded and the AU is accessible through the web server, the content is now considered staged for ingest.