The Open Parks Network (OPN) project digitized over 330k items from U.S. national and state parks. While the mass digitization effort was a logistically challenging operation, ensuring metadata for this material added another layer of complexity this offsite-managed project. In the best case scenario, the parks provided existing descriptive metadata, but this still lacked preferred elements. In many cases, digitized material had never been cataloged by the park.

To orchestrate adequate descriptive metadata, OPN employed tactics to catalog this large-scale project. This session encourages an exchange of experiences and ideas from others when faced with similar situations.