New Initiatives for Resource Description and Preservation Metadata Priscilla Caplan Assistant Director for Digital Library Services State University System of Florida Sally H. McCallum Chief, Network Development and MARC Standards Office Library of Congress Rebecca S. Guenther Network Development and MARC Standards Office Library of Congress A new working group, composed of representatives from across the digital preservation community, is being organized by OCLC and RLG. It is a follow-on to the OCLC/RLG Preservation Metadata Working Group, which developed a metadata framework to support the long-term retention of digital materials. The new working group will address implementation strategies for preservation metadata. The group will use the metadata framework developed by the first working group as a starting point, and extend this work to consider issues such as the development of a core set of implementable preservation metadata elements with associated data dictionary; evaluation of alternative strategies for encoding, storage, management, and exchange of preservation metadata; and the development of pilot projects for testing the group's recommendations. MARC, sitting on a NISO/ISO standard for record structures, has been a sound basis for the development of a very large automated bibliographic infrastructure globally. But the newer XML record structure provides a flexible environment for use and manipulation of data and, especially, for linking data. Providing an evolutionary pathway from MARC "classic" to MARC in an XML structure, and then developing new approaches in the XML side is the topic of this session. A MARC Toolkit is being developed by the Library of Congress (with community collaboration) that contains data transformation components and enables use of Dublin Core, ONIX and other metadata in the MARC environment. It can help standardize the sometimes chaotic metadata landscape. The purpose and uses of a new simplified MARC companion on the XML side, MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema), will also be described.   Web Links: http://www.oclc.org/research/pmwg/ http://www.loc.gov/marcxml http://www.loc.gov/mods