The ingestion process of digital objects into a long term archive constitutes a critical phase of the overall archiving process during which the object's content, metadata, context, and provenance have to be assembled correctly. This task becomes quite complicated when there are many independent producers involved, each with a possibly different arrangement with the archive. In this paper, we describe the underpinnings of a novel software environment for capturing the interactions between distributed producers and an archive which ensures the inclusion of all the necessary elements to preserve the digital information. A prototype system called PAWN (Producer – Archive Workflow Network) provides a flexible and scalable platform for creating and securely ingesting digital information into a remote archive while allowing flexible interactions between the producer and the archive. PAWN is policy – driven with built-in core functions and policies that can be customized to address ingestion requirements for any archiving community. The environment is platform – independent and is based on open standards and web technologies, and is designed to operate across multiple administrative domains using strong security mechanisms. The latest PAWN release version .5 is currently under testing by a number of projects that involve realistic environments with significant amounts of digital data to be preserved.