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Sustainable management of large amounts of research data is gaining in importance for research projects all over the world. The European project DARIAH aims to address this topic for the arts and humanities community. The DARIAH Bit Preservation, as a part of an archiving system for the arts and humanities, allows for a high performance, sustainable, and distributed storage of research data as basis of virtual research environments. A great challenge in designing such a service is to provide a standardized, consistent yet easy-to-use API for accessing the data that remains stable even if backend technology changes over time. As a solution, this paper presents the RESTful API of the DARIAH Bit Preservation which includes an administrative extension, and which is secured by an Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) based on SAML. An exemplary implementation illustrates that the API offers distributed access by usage of the HTTP protocol and is able to handle a high number of files. Data transfer rates of up to 45 MB/s were achieved for uploading large files in the local network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Digital methods and collaborative research in virtual research environments are gaining in importance for the arts and humanities. The EU-funded project DARIAH aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across these disciplines. The most basic but nevertheless fundamental task of DARIAH is to provide sustainable storage for research data. Information contained in data like images, texts or music needs to be secured and to remain accessible even if the original information carrier becomes lost or corrupted. The heterogeneity of the humanistic data and the need for distributed, perform ant access are the main challenges in designing an archiving system for the arts and humanities. Using the "Virtual Scriptorium", a digitisation project in Trier, Germany, this paper exemplary identifies the humanistic researchers' storage needs and derives requirements for an infrastructure. As a solution, a generic architecture for a federated data zone based on the iRODS technologies is proposed. The system implemented in Trier and Karlsruhe is described and will be extended to other locations as the researchers benefit from the initial set-up. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]