Once you have completed the first draft of your metadata document, you can check for errors using the Parse with MP function in the NPS Tools. To parse is to break something down into its component parts. MP is a program that analyzes the components of your document and checks its structure against the FGDC standard. It checks to see if you left any mandatory fields blank, and it checks that your entries are the expected type of entry for each field. In other words, if the field expects a number, MP will alert you if you typed in letters instead. MP also can be used to output your metadata to a variety of formats, including SGML, XML, HTML, and TXT.

Note that MP cannot confirm that you actually typed useful or coherent information in each field - it can only tell you if you left something blank or if you entered the wrong type of information.

NPS Metadata Tools also includes a Spellcheck Metadata feature. This tools uses Microsoft Word's spellchecker. Unfortunately, the headings of the fields are not recognized by Word, so you'll likely have to click through a lot of extraneous spelling errors to get to the actual text you entered.

MP is also available for download from USGS (see the Tools link for more information about MP).