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Metadata plays a crucial role in a digital library/museum environment. However, the development of metadata is not an easy task. Its formulation starts with analysing the attributes of collections as well as understanding the user information needs and information seeking behaviour. The issue of interoperability also needs to be considered in terms of both semantics and syntax. This paper discusses issues related to the development of metadata in Taiwan. It describes the development process of a Chinese metadata system, Metadata Interchange for Chinese Information (MICI), and an XML/metadata management system, Metalogy. Both were developed under the Digital Museum Initiative sponsored by the National Science Council of Taiwan.

The purpose of this paper is to present the practical and unique approach to construct an institutional repository (IR) at the National Taiwan University (NTU).

In general, IR systems are used to preserve the research outputs of academic organizations. The preserved contents as a whole will demonstrate the achievements and influences of organizations. The NTU Repository (NTUR) project is the action which is the response of NTU Library to the converging and emerging issues. The system design of NTUR is based on a well‐known open‐source package, DSpace, but many of its functional modules are modified to fulfill the requirements of Chinese users. The content acquisition of NTUR is carried out by a machine‐aided manual approach, which quickly accumulates the volume of registered digital objects in NTUR.

With comparison to other IR systems, it is found that a content‐rich system with the much friendlier user interface like NTUR could be constructed in an effective way. The post‐processing for search results – which is very unique feature of NTUR – could be also implemented effectively.

Many investigations point out that an open‐access IR system can decrease the cost in dissemination of scholarly information and increase the impacts of research outputs.

The practical approach to the construction of an institutional repository at NTU has been proposed. The approach can make NTUR quickly acquire a large volume of digital objects. This makes NTUR a much more content‐rich repository with comparison to other similar IR systems.

Web technology presents exciting opportunities for the curators of collections of digitised images, but collaboration is vital if this potential is to be realised. DMU's ELISE II project, aiming to demonstrate a service that provides access to multiple image collections, is especially supportive of the cooperative development and uptake of standards for data transfer (e.g. Z39.50) and for the representation of structure and content (e.g. Dublin Core metadata).