Note to the METS list from Carl Fleischhauer and the audio-visual project team at the Library of Congress, January 27, 2002. We have been hashing over the re-design of the relational database from which we propose to generate METS documents. In the course of this, we found ourselves in need of help re: the primary schema and the "area" element (which appears back to back with "sequence"). I won't try to say this in XML-speak (I am XML illiterate) but will do my best to express the question in lay language. The _seq_ element is defined as "should be used to link a div to a set of content files when those files should be played sequentially to display content to a user. Individual area subelements within the seq element provide the links to the files or portions thereof." This seems to be about a group of files, understood to come one after the other. The _area_ element is defined as providing "more sophisticated linking between a div element and content files representing that div, be they text, image, audio, or video files. An area element can link a div to a point within a file, to a one-dimension segment of a file (e.g., text screen, image line, audio/video clip), or a two-dimensional section of a file (e.g, subsection of an image, or a subsection of the video display of a video file." This seems to be about "inside one file" and NOT about a group of separate files. We worry that this leaves "orphaned" a scanning phenomenon we encountered in American Memory: "the billboard job." For very large posters, for example, we sometimes made several rows of images, representing tiles of the oversized original. In a perfect display system, these would come up in a grid: image.a1 image.a2 image.a3 image.b1 image.b2 image.b3 image.c1 image.c2 image.c3 Question: can we use the "area" elements to do this, or is there another trick we didn't notice? If not, perhaps this is a METS version-two desideratum. Thanks for the advice! Carl