METS Dissemination: Interfaces METS Opening Day 28 October, 2003 Leslie Myrick

NYU Collections using METS Interfaces EAD Finding Aids Tokyo Tribunal Proceedings Afghanistan Digital Library * CRL Web Archiving Project DRAM Hemispheric Institute REPO History Sign Project

Ingredients Tomcat Servlet Engine XSLServlet or SaxonServlet XT or Saxon Transformation Engine MySQL Database for generation Perl DBI and CGI for interface to DB

Why XSLT? Relatively simple Open-source, platform-neutral, standards- based Official Recommendation of W3C It is XML

Free XSLT Tools Abound Editors: emacs, NoteTab + Xalan.bat Servlet Containers – Tomcat, Resin Transformation Engines – Xalan, Saxon, XT Parsers – Xerces, Aelfred,XP/Sax, Crimson Parsing APIs: DOM, SAX

METS as a Functional Syntax METS designed not only for transfer and archival management, but for giving access to, navigating an object METS + XSLT can create dynamic interfaces with links to resources and their metadata METS can be dumped into Oracle, indexed and searched using context-aware queries.

How to Navigate a METS Document ID, IDREF, IDREFS – Each ID must have a matching IDREF and v.v. – To match an ID against more than one value use IDREFS (e.g. multiple ADMID values in METS:file Keys – More flexible; they make document into a database

ID, IDREF, IDREFS Provide navigable relationships between files and their metadata in complex Schema e.g. METS Must be defined in Schema or DTD Restrictive: Element can have only one ID; ID values must be unique (e.g. authorID and artistID can’t be same)

Keys; the key() function Creates an index Defined in the stylesheet and not in the DTD/Schema Flexible – many keys on one element: one for each attribute. Any number of elements can match a given value

Uses for METS From the humble Finding Aid … to …

METS and Finding Aids Beyond the href pointer Useful for managing complex image structure – e.g. multiple scans of multiple pages of letters Holistic way to present descriptive metadata along with inline image (all in one package) Also useful for presenting technical metadata that EAD does not yet accommodate

METS Pageturners Creates HTML page or frameset with links to resources Creates navigable relationships between resources in a METS file Creates complex time-based media synchronizationss

Sfquad.xml redux Question: could XSLT mimic java in rendering METS? The answer at the time: no – Dynamic frame reloading a special problem

N-YHS Edisto Album Album of 77 images from the Civil War period Logical structure: album – page - images Two to four images per page Presented with or without collapsible TOC

Tokyo Tribunal Simple nested structure: jpg page views of Decision taken by the Tokyo Tribunal Collapsible TOC to unpack logical structure of various parts

Afghanistan Digital Library 40 books from (400 eventually) Simple structure – no chapters for the most part METS Web viewer + PDF / CD version Page Images (TIFF at 600 dpi); service files at dpi

CRL Political Web Archive Collaboration between Stanford, Cornell, Texas, NYU, IA under aegis of CRL, Mellon Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, Latin America, Western Europe Testbed: 400 URLs; websites from radical groups, NGOs Internet Archive.arc files

.arc file 100 MB aggregate of harvested files, along with HTTP headers and crawler- generated header for each file Fine as a simple SIP, but basically unmanageable as an AIP or DIP At present accessed using byte offsets to grab content from aggregate file Only searchable by URL (Wayback Machine)

Can METS save.arc? One solution: a METS file for each website contained in.arc At collection level, ur-METS file to manage the different versions of website on different dates in different.arcs Alternatively, a METS file for each arc, delineating content by byte offset? Naah.

It’s the Structure, Silly Ur-METs with to versions (cf. serials model) Failure of web-archiving access models to date due to indexing at page level only Netarkivet.dk – NWA Document format xml document for each page; indexed by FAST Results: thousands of hits and no context.