Network technologies have helped to lower many of the geographical barriers that impede access to information resources, but other obstacles have appeared in their place: one is the heterogeneous use of resource descriptions; another, more serious, is the lack of resource description at all.

Resource description varies depending on the structure, type and content of resources; it also varies with the interests of the information keepers responsible for the management of these resources. A further consideration in resource discovery is the cross-domain information needs of users who require access to information about relevant resources irrespective of where they are located, how they have been stored or by whom. With the current enabling technology, the more complex needs of users nowadays can be met: querying more than one domain-specific information system in parallel while information managers seek to have a system that enables access to separately managed collections in-house. Example of initiatives that have been developed to encourage timely dissemination of scholarly information is the Open Archive Initiative (OAI)

To meet such information demands, a framework needs to be developed that would allow users to access information regardless of the above-mentioned barriers while giving the managers better control of information management and preservation. One main step forward in the development of such a framework, is the creation of a low barrier metadata format that allows for interoperability between cross-domain information systems. The Dublin Core initiative is a potential example of such a format; the initiative has many positive characteristics that distinguish it as a prime candidate for resource description for the primary goal of electronic resource discovery.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The OAI approach of interoperability attempts to combine the best of library and Internet techniques into a new model of accessing resources. It has adopted a low-barrier interoperability solution known as metadata harvesting, which allows content providers to expose their metadata via an open interface. The open interface prescribes to Unqualified Dublin Core Metadata set.This report outlines a proposed metadata framework for resource discovery of agricultural resources, and in particular to describe documents and document-like resources in agricultural sciences. The project lies within the framework of a wider and more comprehensive project proposal that promotes a metadata set of core elements and qualifiers that are generic to the description of agricultural resources, mainly project and document resources. The overall work is the result of a collaborative effort between a number of partners in the agricultural community and the World Agricultural Information Centre of FAO. The endeavour is formally referred to as the "Agricultural Metadata Standards Initiative". It is based upon the elements and qualifiers of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). The report first provides the overall context for the metadata framework; why the standard is needed; how the work was done, and then offers thoughts on the way forward from here. Annex 1 provides the elements and qualifiers of the proposed standard presented in a hierarchical structure. The hierarchical structure offers a flexible framework to implement the proposed standard at different levels of granularity, depending on the how rich each metadata source are. In its simplest form, metadata can even be supplied at the most general level of 13 core fields.