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The Making of America II was
a Digital Library Federation project to create a proposed digital
library object standard by encoding defined descriptive, administrative
and structural metadata, along with the primary content, inside
a digital library object. The preliminary digital object "standard"
that came out of the project is now itself obsolete--but served
as the starting point for the development of the Metadata Encoding
and Transmission Standard (METS),
which is currently maintained by the Library of Congress. The original
documentation leading to the development of the MOA2.DTD is maintained
here for its historical interest. However, working examples of "MOA2"
objects are no longer being maintained, and visitors to this site
who are interested in an actively and widely used XML standard for
encoding digital materials are referred to the METS
website.
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A standard digital library object will promote:
The DTD can be used to define a transfer syntax to move
digital objects between repositories, between a repository and a viewer,
etc.
A standard object encoding will allow digital library
architectures to be built on scalable digital object technologies (OOD,
the JAVA Enterprise Model, RMI, CORBA, etc.), as opposed to gluing a digital
library together with CGI scripts and HTML
Archiving and migrating well defined objects to new technologies
will certainly be easier than dealing with many proprietary encodings (e.g.,
Berkeley’s digital object encoding for a book, Stanford’s encoding, etc.)The
cornerstone of the MoA II effort an XML DTD that defines the digital object’s
elements and encoding. The project has also developed a relational database
that allows a library to capture the metadata, a program that reads the
database and automatically creates the XML encoded digital objects, a repository
manager that provides distributed network access to the objects (via RMI)
and a viewer that displays MoA II objects from the repository.
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