You can use install.packages() to install this package, but to use it in R, you will have to add the XML/libs directory to your path or copy the files libxml2.dll zlib.dll iconv.dll to a directory in your path. Putting them into the directory which contains Rgui.exe and Rterm.exe for this version of R is probably best. They will hopefully not interfere with other applications that rely on alternate versions. ===================================================================== COMPILING the PACKAGE --------------------- To compile this package on a Windows machine is quite easy. Since the package depends on libxml (version 2), you will have to get the development version of that package for compiling with MingGW. To do this, I have followed the links from www.xmlsloft.org to http://www.zlatkovic.com/libxml.en.html From the "Getting the Binaries" section, download the zlib, iconv, libxml2 (and openssl) zip files. Having fetched these binaries, I unzip these and move the relevant files to a common area. Specifically, in my HOME directory on the cygwin setup on Windows, I create the following directories: include/ lib/ bin/ Then I copy the files from each of these directories in the .zip files to these directories. Now, all we need to do is tell the GNU make utility where to find these header and library files. You can either edit the src/Makevars.win file and specify a value for (the now misnamed) LIB_XML variable to the directory containing the include/, lib/ and bin/ directory created earlier. In my case, this is $HOME, but specified as D:/cygwin/home/duncan (rather than /home/duncan). The remainder of the file should not need to be modified. Alternatively, you can specify this as an environment variable, e.g. export LIBM_XML=D:/cygwin/home/duncan To create a binary, I copy libxml2.dll, iconv.dll and zlib.dll to the directory XML/inst/libs in the source and then run Rcmd build --binary XML