So while waiting for my consulting contract from UVM to come through I thought I’d while away the time with a METS XForm. This has immediately proved more challenging than I had anticipated. I think it would not be to hard to make institution specific forms but that it will be nearly impossible to create a universal METS editor. Maybe the best bet would to be to create a tool that accepts a template or sample METS record and then builds an XForm from that.
For now however, I’m going to see what I can come up with that is relatively generic. One thing I suspect about METS is that many institutions (including UVM) are generating large portions of the records automagically and that a form would actually slow this process down. The place I see XForms being the most useful for METS is the structMap section where you build a representation of your digital object by organizing the files in the fileSec.
How do you create your METS records? What would you like to see in a METS editor?
I’ll be posting code when I get something half-way presentable, but it would be nice to have a discussion about the variouse ways METS is being used and created and how best to support that.
August 20, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Hi Winona,
Thanks for the blog !
Hope things go well at UVM. I’m going to be in Williston next week visiting family. I moved from Vermont to California 20 years ago and work for IBM here. My family were / are all part of UVM. I’m really interested in XForms applications and XML data. This week I was seeing what came out of the recent Balisage XML conference in Montreal and noticed this paper was presented which may interest you. — Cheers ! Willi Wolf
“Structural Metadata and the Social Limitation of Interoperability: A Sociotechnical View of XML and Digital Library Standards Development ”
Jerome McDonough / Asst. Professor / Graduate School of Library & Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/html/2008/McDonough01/Balisage2008-McDonough01.html
August 20, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Hi Winona,
Enjoy your blog and glad you’re ‘back in the saddle’. We just exchanged some messages on the metadatalibrarians list by the way.
I think I downloaded a METS editor last spring but never unpacked it since I haven’t really been handling METS records. I might have read about it on your blog but in any case you might be familiar with it.
If so, how does it rate along the universality scale?
regards, dana
August 21, 2008 at 12:15 am
Willi,
Thanks for the link, it looks like a very interesting paper. I’ve actually gotten a lot of help on XForms from John Boyer’s (Senior Technical Staff Member for IBM Lotus Forms) blog. Are you currently doing any work with XForms?
UVM has been very supportive in exploring XForms and XML for the digital library project. I think XForms has a lot of potential, although I think a method of generating the forms would be better than the way I’ve been working. I encourage you to stop by the library while you are in town, although I’m still on leave I’m sure you could get a tour of the digital library.
-Winona
August 21, 2008 at 12:22 am
Hi Dana,
I’m not sure what METS editor you mean, I don’t remember mentioning one here, but maybe you mean the METS navigator? I don’t use the METS navigator, it was easier to just write my own with XQuery, a more seamless fit with our app. There is an XForms generator, x2o (http://code.google.com/p/x2o/), but although I’ve downloaded it I have yet to install it and see how it works out. I’d be interested in the name if you still have it, it would be worth checking out. Hope your experiments with eXist and XQuery are going al right.
-Winona
August 22, 2008 at 12:40 pm
You were right. I looked on the other machine on my home LAN and found a Zotero capture of your blog in Feb. My memory conflated your discussion of the MODS editor that you and Michael Brown presented on at Code4lib 2008 and the METS Navigator (still unpacked). Never did get around to viewing any of this year’s presentations.
I will retry the eXist install this weekend. Last year, I tried to importing 1000 UMich records and got an error message. Not sure what the problem was but I later found that the file with the records would not validate because of an empty 650 field. Not sure that was the problem because I was thinking the eXist does not employ XML Schema (or, is not schema-aware?).
dana
August 22, 2008 at 1:34 pm
You can fix the eXist issue by turning off validation (in the conf.xml file). I believe eXist validates XML by default, you can also add schema’s for it to validate against, but if you just want to test things out and not have to worry about massive data clean up I would just turn validation off all together.
-Winona
December 2, 2008 at 4:34 pm
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