----------------------------Original message---------------------------- If you're planning on dealing with spatial data from the U.S. government, it seems likely that you'll need to incorporate fields from the draft metadata standard issued by the Federal GEographic Data Committee. Larry Carver and I have done some work on figuring out equivalencies between MARC fields and what's in the draft standard and amazingly enough, those equivalencies do exist for say, half of the draft metadata fields. Mary Larsgaard, UCSB Map & Imagery lab