[OAI-implementers] Returning data

[Garey Mills]

Hi -

	This thread is interesting to me because I have been thinking
about how to marry OAI and the Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard
(METS) (found at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets).
	METS is an XML encoding that provides for various types of
metadata (structural, descriptive, provenance) and multiple encodings
inside each category (for example, a METS object could have both a MARC
and a DC descriptive metadata component). 
	What I like about METS is that documents can be in multiple
pieces, and the structural metadata can tell you how to put them together.
Also having data on how a document was digitalized and when is important
for assembling digital libraries.
	I was leaning toward using OAI only to return descriptive metadata
that pointed to a page that gave the user the option of downloading the
METS representation of the document, but I see that that question is
pretty complex.


Garey Mills
Library Systems Office
UC Berkeley