Dear friends,
During the past few years, the DLF has supported work on mechanisms for
describing technical, structural, and administrative characteristics of
digital objects.

Initial recommendations about technical, structural, and administrative
metadata emerged from the Making of America II initiative (see
http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlfmoaii.htm).

In recent months, these have been refined and extended by a DLF working
group into a more inclusive "Metadata Encoding and Transmission Scheme"
(METS). Work of the initiative is fully documented on a website that is
being maintained by the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/mets/. The
site includes an overview and tutorial, a beta version of the METS schema
(in XML), an example METS XML document, and METS documentation.

A further meeting of the METS working group is scheduled for September 2001.
In advance of that meeting, the group seeks review of and comments on its
work, particularly on the draft schema.

All comments should be sent to Jerry McDonough at [log in to unmask]

Cheers,
Dan



Daniel Greenstein
Director, Digital Library Federation
1755 Massachusetts Ave, NW #500
Washington DC 20036
(202) 939-4762