It's Opening Day for METS

摘要

In early april, about 100 librarians gathered at Stanford University for the second METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) Opening Day. The first was held at the Library of Congress (LC) in October 2003. Designed as an opportunity to learn about METS, the meeting included demonstrations of how libraries are using this emerging standard. A third such session is scheduled for London on July 12, 2004. The roots of METS go back to the beginning of digitization projects in libraries. Once you've scanned a book, what do you have? You have hundreds of individual digital files and no practical way to "bind" them all back together into an easily navigable whole. This is where METS comes in. METS provides a method to describe the structure of a digital object as well as encapsulate one or more packages of descriptive metadata, rights information, and information about how the item was digitized. METS provides a way to create a neat package of all the relevant files and metadata pertaining to a digital object. More important, it provides a standard way to package a digital object that can then be shared with other libraries, thereby promoting interoperability of digital objects.