Hello: To support digital library work we are doing at Harvard, we have developed a prototype Java toolkit that can be used to procedurally construct, validate, serialize and de-serialize METS files. The toolkit API is based on Sun's JAXB specification. Even though JAXB is supposed to include a schema compiler to automatically generate Java binding classes from a schema, since JAXB is still in pre-release development that compiler is not yet available in suitable form. So all of the toolkit classes have been built manually. (Not a terrible job; since they all have the same structure, there was a lot of cut-and-paste.) The low-level parser is built on James Clark's XP. The web page <http://hul.harvard.edu/~stephen/mets.html> provides a better description of the toolkit, as well as providing a link to a downloadable version <http://ois.harvard.edu/~stephen/mtk-20020315.tar.gz>. In addition to all the source code, there are two test applications, one that procedurally constructs, validates, and serializes a METS file, and one that de-serializes a METS file to an in-memory representation of instantiated toolkit classes. The quickest way to get a feel for the toolkit it to examine the source code for these two apps, Marshal.java and Unmarshal.java. Just to keep the internal toolkit structure in line with JAXB, I define three packages, org.mets.xml.bind, org.mets.xml.marshal, and org.mets.xml.mets. This should be changed at some point, because the domain name mets.org is registered to the Miami Evangelical Seminary. As METS tools such as this are developed, should there be a common package naming scheme for them? This is still a rough prototype, but it seems to work for the small amount of simple testing that I have done so far. I wanted to publicize this in order to get feedback from the wider community. For example: Is such a toolkit a useful idea? Is there a better solution already existing? Is JAXB a good model for the toolkit API? I am planning to put together a more former and in depth description of the toolkit for the Spring DLF forum. Any comments that I receive before then will be incorporated. Thanks,