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Hi all, I'm trying to understand how digital library systems work when there is a need to search both metadata and item text content (plain text/full text), and when the item is made up of more than one file (so, think a digitized multi-page yearbook or newspaper). I'm not looking for answers to a specific problem, really, just looking to know what is the current state of community practice. In our current system (ContentDM), the "full text" of something lives in the metadata record, so it is indexed and searched along with the metadata, and essentially treated as if it were metadata. (Correct?). This causes problems in advanced searching and muddies the relationship between what is typically a descriptive metadata record and the file that is associated with the record. It doesn't seem like a great model for the average digital library. True? I know the answer is "it depends", but humor me... :) If it isn't great, and there are better models, what are they? I was taught METS in school, and based on that, I'd approach the metadata in a METS or METS-like fashion. But I'm unclear on the steps from having a bunch of METS records that include descriptive metadata and pointers to text files of the OCR (we don't, but if we did...) to indexing and providing results to users. I think another way of phrasing this question might be: how is the full text of a compound object (in the sense of a digitized yearbook or similar) typically indexed? The user requirements for this situation are essentially: 1. User can search for something and get a list of results. If something (let's say a pamphlet) appears in results based on a hit in full text, the user selects the pamphlet which opens to the file (or page of the pamphlet) that contains the text that was matched. This is pretty normal and does work in our current system. 2. In an advanced search, a user might search for a name in the "author" field and a phrase in the "full text" field, and say they want both conditions to be fulfilled. In our current system, this won't provide results when it should, because the full text content is in one record and the author's name is in another record, so the AND condition can't be met. 3. Librarians can link description metadata records (DC in our case) to particular files, sometimes one to one, sometimes many to one, sometimes one to many. If this is too unclear, let me know... Thanks! -- Laura Buchholz Digital Projects Librarian Reed College Library 503-517-7629 [log in to unmask]