Can't we start with the Dublin Core or some other already built standard? This is an area I don't know in depth and there are others on this list who know more than I, but I'm not in favour of reinventing the wheel.
I just saw a preprint of a paper to be presented at the Audio Engineering Society in Barcelona in a month about the Thiele archive and they have done some interesting metadata things. I can't publish it, and I don't think the AES will release it until after the conference.
Richard --
Richard L. Hess http://www.richardhess.com/tape/
What I would like to see ARSC do (and offered to do a program on sometime back) is to establish and define...including name, type and size...an "official" definition for the necessary set of "core" fields to allow at least minimal, but useful, data exchange between users of different database applications! Each record collector, or each institution archiving sound recordings, has his/her/its set of "essential" fields to adequately document phonorecords (and other sound items). If we could agree on this set of core fields, we could share data!