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I am working on a small cultural heritage collection that features a few scrapbooks and photo albums from the early to mid-1900s. This collection is the first at our institution to utilize METS for complex objects. Given how new we are to METS, we're still feeling out how to make best use of it -- as well as cope with the limitations of our digital content management software. For each scrapbook/album, I am creating METS records featuring two levels of descriptive metadata: (1) a parent DMD for the object as a whole; and (2) child DMDs for the many individual photos/drawings on the pages. Our grant project is particularly fortunate to have a historian on board, which has allowed us to create rich descriptive records for most individual photos in albums and scrapbooks. Perhaps the most important feature of these records is the identification of people in photos. These names are obviously best captured in the child DMD for each photo, rather than the parent DMD. I am curious how others working with similar materials are utilizing the many descriptive metadata records within a single METS file. I would like to see these records exploited to their fullest capacity for search and discovery, but am unsure what would be the best scenario to make that happen. Our system breaks METS objects into their many component objects. What this means for resource discovery is that child objects as well as parent METS objects are searched and retrieved. So a search that matches a child DMD will retrieve that component image file and child DMD, as well as the entire METS object and parent DMD. For those of you dealing with complex, image-based materials like albums and scrapbooks, how are you allowing your many DMDs to be searched and retrieved? Given our specific software in mind, it looks as if our collection may have at least three options: 1. Allow only parent DMDs to be searched/retrieved through resource discovery, but allow child DMDs to be viewed as the user pages through the METS object as a whole. This kind of functionality might be possible if we can deactivate search/retrieval of child DMDs in our software. According to this scenario, the child DMDs would *not* function as *access* points, but could provide additional information if a user finds a particular photo/drawing for which he/she would like more detail. One particular problem this raises is the inability/difficulty of finding photos of specific people that are located in albums/scrapbooks through the search interface. For example, if one searches Roosevelt and a scrapbook contains a picture of Roosevelt, but that name is only captured in a child DMD, resource discovery will not retrieve that image or scrapbook. 2. Allow both parent and child DMDs (and corresponding objects) to be searched and retrieved. This is the current functionality supported by our software. Using the previous example of searching Roosevelt, this would result in both the specific image of Roosevelt being retrieved (with this record indicating that this child object is part of a particular scrapbook), as well as the scrapbook as a whole. Even if the relationship to the parent is specified in the child DMD, do you think this could be confusing for users? 3. Allow both parent and child DMDs to be searched, but retrieve only the parent METS object. Actually, I'm not even sure if this is possible in our software, but we can always ask for enhancements, right? Using the Roosevelt example again, this would result in the full scrapbook being retrieved for this query. The parent DMD for the scrapbook, however, mentions nothing of Roosevelt, so this might result in confusion/frustration for the user. They might interpret this as a false hit or otherwise get tired of paging through the scrapbook looking for a needle in a haystack, as it were. Unfortunately, our software does not include functionality that would allow the scrapbook to be retrieved but opened to the particular page on which Roosevelt is pictured. This, to me, would be the best option, as access to the individual item would be preserved, but the item would also never be viewed outside its original context within the scrapbook. Any comments/feedback on these options would be greatly appreciated. Do any of these three sound better/worse than the others? Can anyone think of alternative scenarios that would better utilize our metadata and facilitate access to important pieces of a whole? Many thanks, Melanie -------------- Melanie Feltner-Reichert Digital Coordinator IMLS Funded Digital Collection: "From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont" John C. Hodges Library University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tennessee Email: [log in to unmask]