Использование ElementTree:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as E
e = E.parse("test.xml")
print(e.find("type").text)
Использование минидома:
import xml.dom.minidom
d = xml.dom.minidom.parse("test.xml")
print(d.getElementsByTagName("type")[0].firstChild.data)
Использование BeautifulSoup :
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(open("test.xml"))
print(soup.find("type").text)