TDL will address the shortcomings of Dublin Core by developing and implementing metadata standards based on METS. Maintained by the Library of Congress, METS is a standard for encoding administrative metadata using the XML schema language. METS has the potential to serve the needs of the ETD community through the inclusion of different metadata standards for organizing and describing compound ETDs and encoding rights management and preservation metadata. Through the collaboration of librarians at each member institution, a descriptive metadata application profile based on MODS has already been developed , and efforts are being made to draft metadata standards for rights management, a preservation metadata profile based on the PREMIS metadata standard, and METS-based metadata for the encoding of compound digital objects. Throughout the project, TDL will work directly with the NDLTD to contribute to the development of standards for metadata.