Institutions dealing with electronic theses and dissertations have all developed their own standards or adapted existing metadata standards. These metadata standards all attempt to describe the author, the work, and the context in which the work was produced in a way that will be useful to the researcher as well as the librarians and/or technical staff maintaining the work in its electronic form. This document is not a replacement for the metadata schemes developed for a particular university or environment. Rather, this document should be used as a guideline to develop a faithful cross-walk between local metadata standards and a single standard used for sharing information about ETDs