Repository Metadata Collection and Curation Practices
A Barcelona Declaration / COAR joint survey
Available languages: English | Español | Português | 中文
Why this is important: Repositories play a key role in the scholarly communications landscape by preserving and providing access to a wide range of valuable research outputs. The metadata collected and made openly available by repositories supports discovery by search and indexing systems. It is used by researchers, institutions, funders, service providers, and policy makers for reporting, monitoring, research assessment, and the development of value-added services.
The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information and COAR have a shared interest in improving the quality of metadata in repositories. Accurate, granular metadata is essential for making repository content discoverable and reusable, and contributes to a trustworthy scholarly ecosystem.
Despite the important role repositories can play, metadata collection and curation practices vary significantly across the repository landscape, particularly in terms of metadata quality, completeness, consistency, and availability for reuse.
Purpose: This survey aims to gather comparable, high-level information about how repositories collect, curate, and make available research information (metadata), and to identify common practices, challenges and effective approaches to metadata curation for the broader community. The findings will help raise awareness of the value of high-quality metadata and inform ideas and strategies for repositories to strengthen their metadata practices.
About the repositories in scope in this survey: This survey focuses on institutional, national, disciplinary, federal, and other repositories that collect, curate, preserve, and make available scholarly resources and the metadata associated with those research outputs.
Who should respond: repository managers, repository librarians, technical leads, curators. The survey should ideally be completed by individuals with sufficient knowledge of repository workflows, metadata collection and curation practices, and decisions related to research information systems and infrastructure.
Note. If your organization operates more than one repository, please complete a separate survey for each repository.
Estimated time to complete: 20-30 minutes
The survey will be open from 3 November 2026 -15 December 2026