As part of Issue Area 4 of the Electronic Records Management Initiative, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is developing tools for agencies to use in transferring permanent electronic records to the National Archives of the United States. The objectives of the Records Management Metadata and Schema Project are to:

1. identify metadata agencies need to transfer electronic records to NARA using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and
2. create the schema to encapsulate those metadata element.

A working group comprised of agency Records Officers and agency representatives with XML expertise has been formed to evaluate metadata currently in use for records transfer. Concurrently, an internal NARA working group is conducting a similar evaluation from the perspective of those who process those records will go into the compilation of that list. These reviews will culminate in a revised list of recommended metadata to be submitted to NARA in December 2002. After NARA approval of the list, the project will use the metadata, to create an XML records transfer schema with the assistance of outside expertise in XML. The schema is to be completed and registered in a repository by June 2003.