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Hello, Some of you may have read my previous postings on the subject of the IWF Metadata Harvester: http://www.nongnu.org/iwf-mdh/ I worked on developing this package as part of a government-sponsored employment program in Germany. My contract with the IWF Wissen und Media gGmbH has now ended. However, the IWF has generously allowed me to publish my work under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Free Documentation License (FDL), so that I can use it in a project of my own, now that I am no longer employed. The IWF may continue developing the original package. The IWF Metadata Harvester was developed for a particular purpose. In my own work, I plan to take a different approach. For one thing, I will be developing for a GNU/Linux system rather than a Windows system. I have submitted the project to the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation for approval, and hope that it will be accepted. This implies that it will have no non-free dependencies. I have started looking into free databases to use instead of Microsoft SQL Server. I also plan to place more emphasis on stability and error handling. The working name for my project is "Metadata Exchange Utilities" (and I hope to append "GNU" to the front of it). I say "Exchange" rather than "Harvesting" because a logical extension would be for it to provide data as well as retrieving it. I believe that an entirely free package (in the sense of the GNU GPL) that retrieves (and possibly supplies) metadata could be of use to libraries, archives, museums, other institutions, and individual researchers. Under the terms of the GPL and FDL, providers of data could distribute the package without having to register or make special licensing arrangements. Using free database software will make it possible for me to include it in the distribution of my package, if desirable. It might also be possible for libraries, etc., to provide pre-filled databases to users, or the databases could be filled upon installation. I would like to find out whether such a package would be of interest to libraries, etc., and if so, what features they would like to have. For the IWF Metadata Harvester, I was working on retrieving data in Pica format from a Z39.50 server. I'm not sure how much interest there is in Pica data, so that I'm considering switching over to USMARC. Ideally, I would like to continue this work under the auspices of a library, museum, or other institution; preferably, but not necessarily, in the US, Canada, or Europe. Any comments or questions would be very welcome. Thank you, Laurence Finston