MOVING TOWARDS SHAREABLE METADATA Sarah L. Shreeves, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, direct comments to sshreeve@uiuc.edu Jenn Riley, Indiana University-Bloomington, jenlrile@indiana.edu Liz Milewicz, Emory University, emilewi@emory.edu ABSTRACT A focus of digital libraries, particularly since the advent of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, is aggregating from multiple collections metadata describing digital content. However, the quality and interoperability of the metadata often prevents such aggregations from offering much more than very simple search and discovery services. Shareable metadata is metadata which can be understood and used outside of its local environment by aggregators to provide more advanced services. This paper, based on a workshop given by the authors at the February 2006 WebWise Conference in Los Angeles, CA, describes shareable metadata, its characteristics, and its importance to digital library development, as well as barriers and challenges to its implementation. INTRODUCTION Libraries, museums and other cultural heritage institutions (with varying degrees of comfort) are seeing their digital content and metadata showing up everywhere these days.