Jerry McDonough: METS

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a hub standard that links metadata and files. Jerry McDonough of the New York University Libraries presented on METS at the TEI Members’ Meeting. He showed a neat use of METS to joint an MPEG video clip to a TEI transcript, but the heart of his talk was about the proliferation and interaction of standards like TEI, EAD, METS, IMS, and so on. There is a temptation to think that with a bit more a standard like the TEI can embrace (swallow) other standards giving us one instead of many. He argued that a) we don’t technically need to merge related standards, and b) it is not right to do that. He pointed to the politics and histories of these groups/standards. We need a sociology of standards.

The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.

There are seven parts to a METS file:

  • METS header
  • Descriptive metadata – multiple
  • Administrative metadata
  • File inventory
  • Structural map: “The structural map is the heart of a METS document. It outlines a hierarchical structure for the digital library object, and links the elements of that structure to content files and metadata that pertain to each element.”
  • Structural links
  • Behavior