How to Build, Display and Find mets objects Nate Trail

How to Build, Display and Find METS Objects

• Nate Trail

• Digital Project Coordinator

• Network Development and MARC Standards Office

• Library of Congress

• ALA - June 25, 2007

Technologies Used

• XML documents

• METS Files
• MODS Files

• XSLT processes

• Transformation
• Display

• MySQL Database

• Cocoon framework

• And a little Java

XSLT Transformation

XSLT for Display

Web Framework Concepts

• User input via URL

Key Elements in Describing an Object

Bibliographic data (1)

• Harvested from Voyager ILS (SRU/z3950)

• Inserted into MySQL database

Bibliographic Data(2)

• Direct Data entry for items not previously cataloged

METS Maker Pipeline – Step 1

• Bibliographic Data is extracted from the database and converted to MODS

METS Maker Pipeline – Step 2

• Combine queries of:

• Object type (SheetMusic, RecordedEvent etc.)
• Files on the server
• MODS data
• Rights metadata

• Creates a virtual file called “pre-mets”

METS Maker Pipeline – Step 3

• METS Maker XSLT processes the file using the object’s profile and builds a METS File

Display – Step 1

• Within-object Navigation

Display – Step 2

• Descriptive information about the object

Display – Step 3

• Page-turning or Playlists

Display – Step 4

• Add page framing and breadcrumbs

Veterans History Project Displays

Searching

• Lucene is open source and scalable to large indexes: Australia has 16 million items indexed

• Lucene indexes are easy to configure using XSLT: METS  Indexed item

Searching in LC Presents

• Single box search offered on home page

• Collection-level search offered for subcollections

• Searches may also be limited to certain fields or object types

Searching in LC Presents

• Canned search to create “virtual collections”

Searching in LC Presents

• New browsing capability

Searching in Veterans History

Browsing in Veterans History

Searching in Minerva (across collections)

Other Web Tools

• SQL – query any Oracle or MySQL tables from the browser

• Holdings queries (beyond z3950/SRU)

• Site administration

• Convert from MARC to MODS or MODS to MARC
• Convert HTML to XML
• Link checking

Future Directions

• New Behaviors, Profiles

• Article OCR
• Multivolume Monograph
• Generating RSS data on the fly

• Integrate JHOVE file inspection tool (and MIX metadata) into our METS objects

• Move to JPEG2000 file format for images

Conclusions

• Profiles in METS help define an object and it’s range of behaviors

• METS and MODS play well together

Conclusions, cont.

• MODS is extremely powerful as a structural tool, not just a bibliographic tool

• Consistent, authoritative, structured metadata makes search and display for an object persistent into future software and hardware systems

Conclusions, cont.

Nate Trail

• Nate Trail

• [e-mail]