Hi Jim, thanks again for sharing this and opening the discussion with the community. At SP / OCUL we are planning something similar but a bit different using the Archivematica tool to generate bagIT AIPs of our Dataverse datasets. Archivematica inherently produces a METS metadata file for tracking data and metadata transfers and different kinds of preservation events (it uses the PREMIS vocabulary to track preservation events and encapsulates this with some descriptive metadata in a METS file). It has been described as a bit of a complicated and lengthy standard (METS) but it has a lot of components to it that we think will help us to better recreate and reuse digital objects being preserved in the future. It will be interesting to compare to your approach no doubt.
For now, we are working with the Artefactual team to finalize the data and metadata transfer procedures in Archivematica, which uses the Dataverse Data Access API to get files. This grabs the DV and user generated metadata in JSON format, along with original and derivative data files, processes this and creates METS and PREMIS metadata to accompany the data, and then as a final step packages the files into the AIP structure and transfers it to our locally hosted distributed cloud system for long-term preservation. You can review the basic steps on the Archivematica wiki:
https://wiki.archivematica.org/Dataverse
One of the more interesting things about the project is the mapping between DV generated DDI metadata and METS for storing the original descriptive metadata. We are envisioning reusing this METS metadata in some kind of archival storage / digital asset management layer for identifying preserved objects in our shared digital research archive (similar to DPN). Open metadata about the preserved objects will be key to ensuring integration between repositories and preservation systems in all likelihood. Either way our projects sound very similar and I'm looking forward to digging into your OAI-ORE generated metadata and AIPs!
We are anticipating a production release of Archivematica sometime in the fall, so things are moving quickly in terms of testing on our end. We will keep you posted on what we find, for now I've attached a METS file that does capture some additional things but I haven't fully dug into it all yet! :)
Best,
Amber