METS Java Toolkit
Draft Version 1.0 (alpha) 2002/03/15

We present a Java toolkit for the procedural construction, validation, and marshalling and unmarshalling for METS, the Metadata Encoding & Tranmission Standard for XML encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library. The toolkit API is based on Sun's JAXB binding framework, under which elements are represented by classes with accessor and mutator methods for attributes and the element content model, and additional methods for validation and marshalling to and from instance documents. JAXB was chosen as the basis for the METS API due to its anticipated market acceptance as a key component of Sun's Java XML Pack bundle. The toolkit's parser is James Clark's XP.

The toolkit was developed to allow procedural processing of METS files in the context of an archiving project in which multiple content providers submit materials packaged in METS files to a centralized archive. To achieve necessary operating efficiencies, a maximum level of automation is required for the creation of syntactically valid METS files on the provider side and for the ingest of those METS files on the archive side. The toolkit will be used as the basis for development of these automated systems.

References

Java API for XML Binding (JAXB), Sun Microsystems, <http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxb/>.

Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard (METS), Library of Congress, Network Development MARC Standards Office <http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/>.

XP - An XML Parser in Java, James Clark <http://www.jclark.com/xml/xp/>.