# Presentation: 918966

## The British Library’s METS Experience

- The Cost of METS
- Carl Wilson
- carl.wilson@bl.uk

**Notes:**
Say a little about the BL, highlight the size of the collection and the amount of digital material.
Introduce myself, highlight the fact that I’m primarily an IT person rather than a librarian, just to emphasise my own perspective.

## Introduction

- A relatively young organisation, formed in 1971
- A large collection of items, approximately 20 million
- A rapidly growing collection of digital items, between 30 and 50 Terabytes
- A large budget BUT
- The British Library is a large organisation with many responsibilities
- Large collections mean that efficiency is essential
- There seems to be a misconception in some quarters that METS is expensive
- Our experience suggests that METS saves costs but creating and collecting metadata to archive and preserve digital objects can be expensive regardless of methods used

## The OAIS Reference Model

- OAIS is the reference model for an **O**pen **A**rchival **I**nformation **S**ystem
- Provides a framework and a common vocabulary for archival concepts
- Focused on long term digital information preservation and access
- Key Terms:
**S**ubmission **I**nformation **P**ackage (SIP)
**A**rchival **I**nformation **P**ackage (AIP)
**D**issemination **I**nformation **P**ackage (DIP)

## SIPs, AIPs, and DIPs are all Information Packages

- An Information Package contains Content Information and Preservation Description Information

- Content Information

- PreservationDescription Information

- Packaging Information

- DescriptiveInformation
- About Package

## OAIS Archive External Data

- High level view of OAIS data flow

- Producer

- OAIS Archive

- Consumer

- SubmissionInformationPackage

- ArchivalInformationPackage

- DisseminationInformationPackage

## The British Library’s Digital Object Management System

- Developed in response to Legal Deposit Legislation
- In principal a copy of all digital material published in the United Kingdom must be deposited at the British Library
- The British Library can claim material from the producer
- In practise the legislation is not yet in place, a Parliamentary Committee is still working on practical legislation

## The British Library’s Digital Object Management System

- Developed in house
- Intended to provide a single preservation level store for the British Library’s digital content
- Standards based
- Design modeled to fit the OAIS Reference Model
- We decided to use METS as:
- Submission Information Package
- Archival Information Package
- Dissemination Information Package

## Why Use Standards?

- Why should an organisation use standards?
- Avoid duplication of effort
- Build upon the work and best practices of other organisations
- Data and metadata standards facilitate exchange of information between organisations using the same standards
**REDUCES COSTS**

## Why Use METS?

- METS uses XML for metadata representation
- XML is a W3C standard for data representation and interchange
- Unicode
- Machine interpretable when validated, use of schema is important
- Human readable, and editable using widely available tools
- Accompanying standards for schema (DTD and XSD) and transformation (XSLT)
- METS was the emerging standard for the encapsulation of data and metadata representing digital objects
- Fits the requirements for SIPs, AIPs, and DIPs
- METS documents can be validated against a schema

## Voluntary Deposit of Electronic Publications (VDEP)

- A pilot scheme started in anticipation of Legal Deposit legislation in 2001
- Content producers voluntarily submit digital material to The British Library
- Electronic content submitted to The British Library on physical carrier, e.g. CD / DVD or by email attachment
- VDEP Team catalogues material and then it is managed and accessed using Digitool, a Digital Asset Management system from Exlibris
- Selected as the first source of content for DOMS

## The Ingest of VDEP Material into DOMS

## The Details

- Descriptive metadata as MARC21 XML
- Validated to schema
- Technical Metadata preserved in proprietary Digitool XML format
- This format was documented but no schema was produced
- In retrospect this was a mistake
- Since rectified by using JHOVE to automate technical metadata production since Digitool 3 introduced
- Original material ingested may have to be revisited
- All other metadata provided by single text documents referenced in the METS AIP
- Rights statement and source statement

## Lessons Learned

- All METS AIPS are validated against schema and can be used by automated systems
- Descriptive Metadata section is also valid
- All other metadata is difficult to use without bespoke development
- The system is entirely automated, barring the creation of the catalogue record
- A quarter of a million METS documents produced at little cost

## Other Automated Ingest Streams

- Sound Archive Ingest
- Thousands of 2 Gigabyte master wav files
- Descriptive metadata gathered from Sound Archive catalogue via Z39.50 and transformed from raw MARC to MARC XML.
- Technical metadata held in the MARC file, this is a Sound Archive convention
- Again single text documents for rights and source metadata
- Automated production of METS documents again reduces costs
- 19th Century Book digitisation
- The outsource digitisation of one hundred thousand books
- 25 million JPEG images, and one hundred thousand PDFs
- MARC XML records obtained from OPAC
- Technical metadata created using JHOVE

## The Cost of One Offs

- The British Library is involved in many single item Digitisations
- Codex Sinaiticus
- An early hand written master copy of the bible
- The Canterbury Tales
- Two early manuscripts including correlation of one edition to the other
- The Shakespeare Quartos
- Once again historical manuscripts with correlation between editions

## Codex Siniaticus

## Conclusions

- The use of METS is not expensive
- The use of standards cuts costs by building upon the work of others
- Automated production of METS documents is cheap
- Use of schema validated documents for automated creation
- There are sometimes unavoidable costs
- Individual historical documents have costs associated with hand crafting metadata structures
- METS doesn’t introduce these costs, the process would always add expense

## Where Next?

- The British Library is involved in many single item Digitisations
- Codex Sinaiticus
- An early hand written master copy of the bible
- The Canterbury Tales
- Two early manuscripts including correlation of one edition to the other
- The Shakespeare Quartos
- Once again historical manuscripts with correlation between editions