apeMETS

The use of METS in the Archives Portal Europe

The Metadata Encoded and Transmission Standard (METS) is a generalised metadata framework, developed to encode the structural metadata for digital objects and related descriptive and administrative metadata. It is especially interesting for archives because it can combine images to objects and describe their internal structure. Launched by the Digital Library Federation, the METS initiative seeks to provide a single, standard mechanism for encoding all forms of metadata for digital objects. METS will simplify both the exchange of objects between repositories and the development of software tools for search and display of those objects. Additionally, METS encoding will provide a coherent means for archiving digital objects and their metadata. The METS standard is maintained by the Library of Congress and more information can be found on the METS-section of its website.

The Archives Portal Europe team first started using METS during the APEx project (2012-2015). The information of the first apeMETS implementation from 2014 can still be found on the website of the APEx project en is now completely transferred to a section of this page. Recently, August 2017, the Archives Portal Europe team conducted a first revision of this apeMETS implementation under supervision of the Working Group on Standards of the Archives Portal Europe Foundation, namely the adaptation of the apeMETSRights schema. This was necessary to be able to align the apeMETSRights values and statements with the ones the portal is using for forwarding content to Europeana.

First apeMETS implementation - April 2014

With the publication of the report "State of the art (SOTA) report on METS and recommendations for its implementation in the Archives Portal Europe", Deliverable D4.7 of the APEx Project, on 28 April 2014, the first implementation of apeMETS in the Archives Portal Europa was completed. The report:

• explains how the apeMETS profile was developed within the APEx project
• deals with how the apeMETSRights profile was built
• encodes the descriptions of 1) apeMETS and 2) apeMETSRights
• describes the use of apeMETS, including the local use of apeMETS besides the use in the portal
• presents different cases of using METS in conjunction with the Archives Portal Europe
• explains shortly how a conversion script was developed to transform an apeEAD file with several constituent links per archival unit into an apeEAD file plus newly-created apeMETS files in order to link to digital objects in a more structured way
• gives some general ideas on how apeMETS could be developed into a topic for the planned Archives Portal Europe Foundation (APEF)