Managing the Rhizome: METS for Web-Archiving Leslie Myrick Digital Library Programmer/Analyst New York University With its quirks of definition and structure, its panoply of associated MIMETypes, and the volatility and ephemerality of its content, a website is arguably one of the most complex (and perhaps exciting) digital objects to capture, describe, manage and preserve. The recently formed International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) is building on groundbreaking work done in the last decade by National Deposit Libraries in Australia, Sweden, France and elsewhere to do just this. A number of the recently announced NDIIPP grants involve a web archiving component – another clear reflection of the perceived urgency to create systems to undertake the archival preservation of the proliferation of important web-based materials. This briefing will examine work undertaken in the Political Communications Web Archive Project sponsored by the Center for Research Libraries in formulating a model for encapsulating a website object in METS as a SIP or as a DIP that can be navigated using an XSLT viewer application. It will also take a preliminary look forward to how knowledge gained will be used to build tools and infrastructure under the auspices of NDIIPP to produce website-level METS that can easily, sustainably and efficiently be ingested into a preservation environment. PowerPoint Presentation Handout (Word document) http://library.nyu.edu/diglib/ http://www.crl.edu/content/PolitWeb.htm