Carl Fleischhauer, from the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress, will be talking with us about some of his experiences with a prototyping project involving metadata and audio-visual digital reformatting. He describes the project as "a little sobering, entailing an attempt to create some sample METS documents at a high level of completeness and then tripping over tools and tool-making approaches." The discussion that evolves from his presentation will be enriched by his interest in certain types of technical metadata, his experiences creating folk-music field recordings and videodiscs, and his knowledge of collection digitization and preservation at the Library of Congress.