I chose to work on my second suggestion (an Ajax METS editor) with Declan Fleming, Todd Holbrook, Peter Binkley, and Mike Giarlo because it is (probably) the most pressing need I have. The results from the group effort were good, I think. Hopefully the project we’ve started gives me, and others I’ll be working with, a direction in which to move once I return to work.

For our project, we first showed how Scriptaculous could be used to create a UI that dynamically creates a hierarchical structure into which images (and different types of metadata (descriptive, technical, etc.)) can be placed (modeling the digital object’s intellectual structure). Next we showed, using work from a Cocoon-based project, how results from the editor could be integrated with files on the file system (including pulling MIX metadata automatically from TIFF images). Lastly, we created an XSL stylesheet that generated METS from the XML data moving through Cocoon’s pipelines.

Our demo is a good proof of concept, I think. Future directions for the editor would include support for more complex hierarchies (ours handles only the most simple case but, hey, it was done in a day after all). For the future, the Scriptaculous techniques demonstrated on this page might prove useful. It certainly looks like what we want to do.

Many UI tweaks would need to be made for the editor to be able to handle hundreds of images. Also needed is a way to link to the descriptive metadata for an item (it would exist in an external database — for our prototype we made some assumptions about files and directories on the file system (convention over configuration)). But, those are things for us to work on in the future.

Overall, it was a pretty fun day (despite me nursing a huge headache — I didn’t get much sleep the night before (I never sleep well the first night away from home)). Like last year, the most interesting part of the Hackfest (and this is the main point for the participants, I think) was getting to see how others approached (or have approached) the problem.

Anyway, this was my second Hackfest and I’d definitely say it was worth doing (even though, I’ll admit, I’m not a person who usually does things quickly). Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to next year’s.