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.
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