Towards a 21st Century Metadata Infrastructure Supporting the Creation, Preservation and Use of Trustworthy Records: Developing the InterPARES 2 Metadata Schema Registry w ANNE GILLILAND 1 , NADAV ROUCHE 1 , LORI LINDBERG 1 and JOANNE EVANS 2 1 Center for Information as Evidence & Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, U.S.A (E-mail: swetland@ucla.edu); 2 School of Information Management and Systems, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Abstract. This paper argues that an essential component of electronic recordkeeping needs to be an infrastructure to support the creation, preservation and accessibility over time of trustworthy, understandable metadata. This infrastructure can then also be used to provide specifications and an implementation environment for automated tools to assist archivists in the ongoing management of trustworthy records and metadata, and users in the identification, retrieval, and manipulation of those records and metadata. The paper discusses this need in the context of the development by the International research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES 2) Description Cross-Domain Group of a metadata schema registry. This registry is a prototype resource designed to assist archivists and records creators in multiple domains in developing and assessing their own and other communities’ metadata infrastructures. The paper concludes by identifying two contested issues that are surfaced and how they are being confronted by this work: one of these is a definitional issue that relates to how to delineate the concept of archival description in the face of competing notions of ‘‘metadata.’’ The other is the extent to which both the life cycle and continuum worldviews and associated activities can or should be supported, reconciled or even re- thought through the conceptual and analytical approach that is embedded in the metadata schema registry. w An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at Smart Metadata and the Archives of the Future: Archives, Memory and Knowledge: International Congress on Archives 2004, Vienna, Austria August 24, 2004. The authors wish to acknowledge the funding support for the InterPARES 2 Project of the United States National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Science Foundation, and the So- cial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors also wish to acknowledge Professor Sue McKemmish of Monash University and Dr. Richard Marciano who have been instrumental in the development of the InterPARES 2 Metadata Schema Registry. Archival Science (2005) 5: 43–78 Ó Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10502-005-9000-4