This site serves as a repository for the NYU Digital Library Team's METS implementation development projects. At present a modest handful of XSLT-based page-turner and search implementations are freely available for use on an "as is" basis. In the pipeline are a java-based SMIL viewer, a java-based application and a perl-based application to extract a METS file from a database using NYU's zeroDB schema.
This viewer is an XSLT solution for the display of multimedia files and text transcriptions of a digital object serialized into an xml-encoded METS document. The viewer can be adapted to present audio and text with links to a "slide show" of image files as well. In this viewer, METS files are transformed to SMIL files for display, and TEI files of transcribed text are transformed to text files with embedded timecode.
In order to control the handling of the display across different browsers and platforms, the viewer utilizes QuickTime to display SMIL files. The accompanying transcriptions are formatted as text with QuickTime descriptors. Because one cannot point into a location within the QuickTime text file, the text file is launched at the beginning of the SMIL file, along with the media file to which it is synchronized. This combination of QuickTime, SMIL, media file and synchronized text file is sufficient to meet the needs of a large number of multimedia viewer applications.