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.
