**METS Editorial Board Meeting Notes**

**March 13, 2008 Teleconference**

Present: Brian, Nancy, Jenn, Rick, Robin, Markus, Rob, Morgan, Adam,
Tobias

Absent: Jerry, Richard, Patrick, Susan

**Agenda:**

-   Board member updates & reports from Workgroups using the new Active
    Task List found on the Board wiki at:

    -   <http://www.socialtext.net/p-mets-board/index.cgi?active_issues>

-   Profile rethink working group

-   OAI-ORE Update

**Notes on Member/Workgroup reports:**

**METS Video Training:** Nancy reports that nothing has yet happened
with the Video training, but still plan to do this before the end of
this fiscal year (for Library of Congress -- October 1^st^). It would be
helpful to know whether we intend to do this during this fiscal year.

**Board Member Vacancies:** Nancy reports that the call for billing
Board vacancies is forthcoming. Will also target a couple of groups
including the National Library of Australia, and vendors such as Ex
Libris and ccs:Docworks.

**Official Liaison to OCLC:** Nancy reports that Merrilee has agreed to
continue with the Board as ex officio liaison to OCLC.

**Chinese Translation of METS schema:** Nancy reports that Chinese
translation of the METS schema and documentation has been forwarded to
reviewers whom Jenn and Jerry McDonough have identified. Brian also
knows Chinese speakers who could provide feedback. The Board expressed a
concern that only the annotations within the XML schema be translated
rather than the tag names translated into Chinese which would be a
different schema. Brian thought that once the schema translation is
received, some tests should be made to make sure that the schema still
validates.

**Creative Commons Licensing:** Plans for further discussion of the
Creative Commons licensing include filling out the scenarios described
in the last meeting minutes, and on the Board wiki to see how a Creative
Commons licensing will impact those scenarios with Creative Commons
personnel, if needed, a small subset of Board members, and Peter
Brantley with DLF counsel, if possible. Nancy will follow up on this.

**DDI:** Nancy reports that the Data Documentation Initiative people
continue to be interested in knowing more about how METS could / would
work with METS. Efforts will be made to write an exemplar METS document
with a data set and codebook either from an ICPSR source or some other
source to illustrate how METS could be used with the new DDI schema. The
DDI Alliance Expert Committee will be meeting at the IASSIST conference
at Stanford in May, and would like to have some discussion of METS at
that meeting. It's yet unclear how or what kind of information would be
most useful to this group, but it appears to be more of a general
overview at this point, and would probably involve Patrick Yott
(hopefully) as well as Nancy. Nancy will report more when there's
something more substantive to report.

**IEEE RAMLET specification efforts: (Resource Aggregation Model for
Learning, Education & Training) :** Hopefully, by end of April, a more
human readable set of documentation (besides the OWL expression of the
ontology) should be available for review by interested parties at which
point, Nancy will forward to the Board. A couple of grants have been
written to JISC to facilitate the implementation of RAMLET as well.
Hopefully, some or all of those will be funded to test the efficacy of
the ontology.

**METSRights:** Nancy reports that some interest has been expressed in
making some changes to METSRights which may result in a survey to go out
to the METS list to see if there are issues about its use that would
warrant some changes being made to it. Whether this happens will be
determined by how much interest is shown in articulating what would be
useful by those who've suggested the changes.

**VRA Core:** The schema has been endorsed by the METS Board and it has
been listed on the METS website as an endorsed schema, but no news
article has been sent to the METS list about it. Notice has been sent to
the VRA core list. Rick will write up an article and send it to the METS
list announcing the METS endorsement, and the location of the schema on
the various websites.

**METS Wiki review:** Rick reports that information about previous METS
Events are being moved to the METS website by Glenn Gardner at LC. The
working group has just completed a major review of the wiki and is in
the process of making some changes to the first page as well as to pages
describing how to suggest schema revision requests.

**Implementation Registry:**

Rick noted that he had has updated the Implementation Registry to
include the implementations from UCSD, the Ministry of Culture in Spain,
and the MBooks Project at the University of Michigan. Other registry
entries have been promised by Rutgers and Princeton. The Ministry of
Culture of Spain may well have more registry entries as they have
required that METS be used for any projects receiving funding from the
Ministry. Rick has been working with Yale on the use of METS for its
mass digitization efforts, and wants to have a specification in place
for METS use. Rick will send a note to the METS list noting the new
edition of the Registry featuring some of the new implementations.

**Documentation on External Schema Endorsement.** Rick will take a first
pass on writing up the meaning of the "endorsement" by the METS Board of
external schemas, and on the procedures for getting the schemas
endorsed.

**XLink changes for EAD, MODS, METS. C**hanges have been made to MODS,
EAD, and now METS so that they all point to the same xlink schema.
Morgan notified MODS & EAD that the changes in METS will be made as of
version 1.7. Once that has been released and officially announced to the
METS list, he will also send a note to the EAD & MODS lists.

**METS Schema changes:** Brian needs to generate some sample METS
documents as part of the documentation for the changed schema before
making the announcements about the changes resulting in version 1.7.

Nancy noted that she had begun to make a list of errors that needed to
be corrected in the documentation for the schema including typos or
other errors in the annotations embedded within the METS schema itself
as well as the METS Primer, METS Overview & Tutorial, etc. This can be
found on the METS wiki at:
<http://www.socialtext.net/mim-2006/index.cgi?mets_documentation_errors_list>
. There is also a link to it from the METS wiki first page.

**METS Profile Re-think:**

Jenn has written up a proposal to scope an approach for those Board
members who are interested in the topic (Brian, Jenn, Morgan, Rob,
Tobias, Rob, Nancy & add Markus). A meeting will be proposed to discuss
the approach in the next couple of weeks. Telephone call dates will be
proposed via email. The general idea is to provide a phased means for
sharing profiles allowing easier use, but also move toward more machine
actionable profiles.

**ORE-OAI & METS:** Jenn, Patrick & Morgan were present at the ORE-OAI
presentation in Baltimore the week before the meeting and reported that
it appeared that the focus for ORE-OAI has changed from moving content
around in general to working only in the web environment which would
reduce the overlap with METS. In general, it would be useful to know
more about how METS & ORE-OAI would work together. It was unclear to
those attending what the use cases were for ORE-OAI. Was the difference
a result of the REST based approach? Was it simply an issue of XML
serialization of ORE-OAI in which case it might make sense to work with
the ORE folks to create a METS serialization of ORE in addition to the
ATOM serialization that was the first approach. It would be useful to
know from Jerry McDonough what his take on ORE, and perhaps have a
discussion about it on the METS Board list. ORE presentations are
available from the Baltimore meeting at:
<http://www.openarchives.org/ore/meetings/hopkins/agenda.htm>.

**METS website Live Examples page:** Morgan reported his success in
putting up a few examples, and is also planning to include annotations &
explanations for each category of example. This can be discussed over
the METS list once the draft page is up. That page

can be found at:
[[http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/mets-examples-with-live.html]{.underline}](http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/mets-examples-with-live.html).
Please review and comment.

**TextMD:** Robin reports that some of the proposed changes to textMD
that have been discussed in a separate effort (from the METS Board) will
appear in the "GoogleMETS" specification that is being negotiated for
books that Google is digitizing. Clay Redding has created a website for
this work, established a listserv, and invites interested members of
both the METS Board and the general METS community to join a small
working group to discuss changes to and maintenance of the textMD
schema, now supported by LC.

**METS Documentation Checklist:** Robin plans to provide a first draft
of a checklist for what needs to be changed / harmonized in the public
METS documentation for discussion at the face to face Board meeting.

**Board Changes:** Adam would like to discuss whether there is an issue
in having both Markus (recently moved to the British Library) and Adam
both sit on the METS Board. This can be discussed at the face to face
meeting.

**New METS service / tool from the British Library:** Markus reports a
new service that the British Library is setting up for sending METS
files to a page turner for smaller libraries. Markus will send a link to
the Board & METS list. This service should be listed on the METS Tools
page, so notice should be sent to Glenn Gardner. The write-up of this
specification may lead to Board discussions about whether we can accept
METS profiles in other languages such as German.

**External schemas for Audio technical Metadata:** Tobias asks whether
there are any available? There was a discussion of the AES x098B data
dictionary and XML schema called Audio Object metadata available
although the schema is not yet finalized. Robin will send it around to
the Board for review although it must still be considered draft along
with a brief explanation of what these schema could be used for what.

**METS and PREMIS:** Rob mentioned a new draft of METS & PREMIS Best
Practices which is forthcoming. There will be a presentation on that
topic at the next DLF meeting at which a few implementors will speak.
Also, a new PREMIS scheme (2.0) will be coming out soon as well. Jenn
reported that she had volunteered to draft up a METS profile for the use
of PREMIS & METS that could be useful for the PREMIS community and for
Indiana.

**Next meeting is at DLF, Wednesday, 30 April 12:30 -- 5 pm (lunch
provided), and Thursday, May 1^st^ 8:30 -- 12:30 pm EDT (breakfast
provided).**

**A recording of the meeting can be heard at:**
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