Additional metadata can be added to Bags when you are creating them for transfer. This metadata is distinct from descriptive metadata – it acts, essentially, like an address on an envelope. It describes information from the sender about the contents of the Bag.
When formatting Bag metadata, similar rules to descriptive metadata apply:
- Tag names should have no spaces – use a dash instead of a space between multiple words
- There should be no line breaks or non-UTF-8 characters in tag names or in the entries
A full description of Bag metadata options are available in the Bagit specification here. The following table gives the tag names, a definition, and example.
| Tag Name | Definition | Entry Example |
| Source-Organization | The organization transferring the content. | Great University Special Collections |
| Organization-Address | The mailing address of the organization. | 1234 Street Avenue, Oxford, ON K0G 1S0 |
| Contact-Name | The person at the source organization who is responsible for the content transfer. | Miriam Smith |
| Contact-Phone | International format telephone number of the person or position responsible. | +1 676-555-5954 |
| Contact-Email | Fully qualified email address of the person or position responsible. | email@greatuniversity.ca |
| External-Description | A brief explanation of the contents and provenance. | Collection of photographs from the… |
| Bag-Size | Size or approximate size of the bag being transferred, intended for human consumption. | Auto-generated |
| Bagging-Date | Date (YYYY-MM-DD) that the content was prepared for delivery. | Auto-generated |
| Payload-Oxum | The “octetstream sum” of the payload; a two-part number of the form “OctetCount.StreamCount”, where OctetCount is the total number of octets (8-bit bytes) across all payload file content, and StreamCount is the total number of payload files. Intended for machine consumption, and used by Archivematica to verify the Bag. | Auto-generated |
| Bag-Group-Identifier | A sender-supplied identifier for a set of bags. If this identifier follows a globally unique scheme, the receiver should make an effort to honor reference to it. | photo_collection_id/title |
| Bag-Count | The order of a bag within a set | 1 of 5 |
| Internal-Sender-Identifier | An alternate sender-specific identifier for the content and/or bag | Collection 1a |
| Internal-Sender-Description | A sender-local description of the contents of the bag | Uncompressed greyscale TIFFs created from microfilm… |